Build

• Title: Building Zentyal from source
• Author(s): Jorge Salamero Sanz
• Date: 15 Jul 2011
• Version(s): 2.2
• Zentyal profiles: All

Building Zentyal from source

Getting started with Zentyal development

This is the first HOWTO on a series of articles on Zentyal development that are aimed at being and update and ultimately a replacement of the old eBox module development guide. It is meant to be an easy-to-follow guide for developing new Zentyal modules and extending the features of the existing ones.

In this guide will show you the necessary steps to implement a full-fledged Zentyal module, using an incremental development approach.

The Zentyal framework has a clear goal: make life easier for those developers and system integrators who want to create an UI to manage Linux services integrated with other services using the same technology. We want developers to focus only on adding functionality with the service their modules manage. The framework tries hard to keep you away from messing with HTML, CGIs, the interaction between the different modules and so on.

Requirements

You should be familiar with a programming language. Although modules are written in Perl, the data structures and syntax should be easily understood by newcomers.

We will start building and running the code, for that you will need a machine running Ubuntu Lucid. We strongly recommend the use of virtual machines for Zentyal development. You can use VirtualBox with a clean Zentyal 2.2 installation to start up. The reason to work with an already installed Zentyal environment is to avoid solving dependency problems when installing packages with dpkg. It’s always a good practice to use the snapshot capabilities to keep a clean environment where to go back.

Learning to build from source

One of the first steps to get involved with the project development is to be able to build the software from the source. You can download the Zentyal source code from our Subversion repository. Let’s see how to fetch Zentyal source and build everything from scratch.

First install some basic development tools:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends \
subversion autoconf automake gettext dpkg-dev devscripts cdbs liberror-perl

Then you have to fetch trunk which is the main development branch.

mkdir ~/zentyal ; cd ~/zentyal
svn co http://svn.zentyal.org/zentyal/trunk/ .

Now add the zentyal-package script to your PATH:

mkdir ~/bin ; cd ~/bin
ln -s ~/zentyal/extra/scripts/zentyal-package

After spawning a new shell to add the new bin directory to your PATH, if you go to the main directory, you will be able to start building the Zentyal packages:

cd ~/zentyal/main
zentyal-package common
zentyal-package core
zentyal-package software
zentyal-package network
zentyal-package services
zentyal-package objects
zentyal-package firewall

… and so on. Now you only need to copy the packages to the virtual machine and install them. If you don’t have these modules already installed you will have to deal with the missing depends:

scp debs-ppa/*.deb user@zentyal-dev:
ssh user@zentyal-dev
sudo dpkg -i --force-all *.deb

You can find all Zentyal modules inside the main directory:

$ ls -1 main/
antivirus
asterisk
ca
common
core
dhcp
dns
ebackup
firewall
ftp
ids
jabber
l7-protocols
mail
mailfilter
monitor
network
ntp
objects
openvpn
printers
radius
remoteservices
samba
services
software
squid
trafficshaping
usercorner
users
webmail
webserver
zarafa

When you start working on your own module, please let the Zentyal Developers and other community members know what you are working on. This is good thing to do in order to avoid overlapping (different people working on similar project) as well as to get feedback and help when necessary. Simply start a new thread in the Zentyal Forum when you start your project and post the advances in the same thread or alternatively, send an e-mail to the public Zentyal Development mailing list.