This is OpenTrack's documentation site

These pages are behind a password, but visible to all the 'inner staff', many of whom are volunteers. We'll try to write down what you need to get work done.

To re-publish changes to this site click here

Below is a rough table of contents, cribbed from ReportLab's wiki. Andy needs to write some content here ASAP!

New starters essentials

choose a username and password for ReportLab's static site, and set up access on the web server in the relevant groups. If you're reading this, we've done it.
if you contact customers in our name, we will create a Google user account in the opentrack.run domain (e.g. @opentrack.run). If not, you could use your own Gmail account.
invite you to our group chat - at least the "OT Horde" group
Invite you to Asana, our work tracking system.
Set you up to record time in our time tracking system

Business Stuff

Time Tracking, Holidays and Scheduling
Directory / names / staff numbers
Hosted services we depend on

Using our systems

Working on the public website
Working on the documentation - both this staff site ad public docs
Creating a local copy of OpenTrack

For developers and sysadmins

When someone new joins, we will also.. * Verify you can see our Mercurial repo, which also means you will be able to pull and push code * Verify you can see this staff docs repo * get you to set up a local copy of the public docs and staff docs, and push and publish a change to it; * set up a copy of the main application, on the left menu bar.

Installing Mercurial

You will need a copy of Mercurial, the version control system we use; it's a rival to Git, which we picked 15 years ago and still believe is "nicer", although Git has since won the popularity contest.

First, check if it's installed by executing hg and seeing if you get output. If not, follow instructions on your platform from the Mercurial site

Then, you can prevent it asking you for a username and password every time by creating a file .hgrc in your home directory, which looks like this (change the details to yourselves):

[ui]
username = Your Name <yourname@example.com>
verbose = True
merge = internal:merge

[auth]
ot.prefix = https://hg.reportlab.com/
ot.username = <your username>
ot.password = <your website password>


[extensions]
mq =

Setting up new starters: what we need to do

ReportLab sites

Accessing the repositories on hg.reportlab.comrequires adding their usernames/password pairs to the corresponding files

Add them manually, by aggreeing on password with the user and entering them via:

  ~/etc/auth/$ htpasswd passwd-hg-otr <username> 
  ~/etc/auth/$ htpasswd passwd-opentrack <username>

If they should have access to update code and docs, not just read it, add their names to the file ~/etc/hg/conf.d/hg-otr.conf which contains a section like this:

allow_push=gus,llewellyn,giacomo,ben,harry

Otherwise, they will get authorisation denied when they try to push changes.

After these, nginx must be restarted to reload the new authorization files:

  $ restart-nginx

As of 9th August 2023, this site is hosted in a directory on ReportLab's app01 machine.