4 Otter is mostly written in Rust. The web UI frontend is written in
5 Typescript. The shape libraries are SVGs and need SVG manipulation
6 libraries. The main documentation is done with Sphinx.
8 You will need at least 6G of disk space, or more, and a good internet
9 connection. Your computer will be compiling a lot of code.
11 These instructions were once tested on Debian 11 "bullseye" and Debian
12 10 "buster". Otter won't build on Debian 9 "stretch" because the
13 Typescript compiler (tsc) is too old. tsc 3.3.3333 is known to work.
14 Ubuntu 20.04LTS "focal" should work.
19 1. Install the packaged build dependencies::
21 sudo apt install build-essential cpio git curl zip \
22 pkg-config libssl-dev \
23 node-typescript inkscape \
24 netpbm imagemagick libtoml-parser-perl \
25 potrace libxml-libxml-perl \
26 python3-sphinx python3-recommonmark
28 And for running the tests (``make check``) you will need::
30 sudo apt install bubblewrap xvfb moreutils firefox-esr
33 2. Install Rust. This is most easily done with rustup_::
35 curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
37 and then follow the instructions about your ``PATH``. If this rune
38 alarms you, see below about Rust privsep.
40 .. _rustup: https://rustup.rs
42 Otter is known to work with Rust 1.59. Probably, many earlier
43 versions well work. Current versions of the dependencies quoted in
44 ``Cargo.toml`` will work, but the minimum versions may be
45 optimistic - newer versions may be needed than are declared.
47 3. Add the WASM Rust target::
49 rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
50 rustup component add miri # for the tests
52 **If you just want to run the otter cli client over ssh to an existing server, or edit and preview the shape libraries (ie the piece shapes) you can stop here.**
54 4. For the tests, install the webdriver binary from Mozilla. Visit
56 https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/tag/v0.28.0
58 and just dump the resulting ``geckodriver`` binary on your ``PATH``.
60 5. The tests also use Nightly Rust because we use Miri to test the
61 small amount of ``unsafe`` in the Otter codebase::
63 rustup toolchain add nightly
64 rustup +nightly component add miri
72 git clone https://salsa.debian.org/iwj/otter
74 make -j8 all bundled-sources && echo it worked
76 Expect to see ``it worked`` at the end. If you don't see that, it
77 failed, and the error message is buried in the scrollback.
79 Build just the command line game management client `otter`
80 ..........................................................
84 cargo build -p otter-cli
86 and then copy ``target/debug/otter`` onto your path.
88 Alternatively, you can let ``cargo`` directly install and download the
89 latest released version:
93 cargo install otter-cli
95 Build just the shape library preview
96 ....................................
102 And then open ``./templates/shapelib.html`` in your browser
105 curl|bash-ware; privsep
106 -----------------------
108 **If you are not the kind of person to worry about computer security -
109 especially your software supply chains - you can skip this part.**
111 If you follow the above instructions, you will have downloaded and
112 executed - and, therefore, trusted:
114 * Various Debian packages - safe
115 * Rustup (the Rust downloader/installer) - this is pretty safe
116 * Rust itself - again, pretty safe
117 * Otter itself - well, I wrote this; up to you.
118 * 475 transitive dependencies of otter (from crates.io)
119 * a geckodriver binary directly from mozilla
121 You will have trusted the integrity of the following:
123 * The Debian archive (via its apt keyring) (very good)
124 * Rustup's and Rust's TLS keyholders (good, I think)
125 * The HTTP TLS cabal (sigh)
126 * github (pretty good in practice)
127 * whatever mozilla do to make binaries, in particular geckodriver
128 * crates.io (extremely poor traceability)
129 * the project management of hundreds of random crates.io libraries
131 If this makes you uncomfortable, as it should, you may wish to
132 consider running everything in a separate shell account, or a VM or
133 container of some kind.
135 (I have a not-properly-released tool called "nailing-cargo" which
136 makes it possible to do most things in my main account but run the
137 Rust stuff in a separate less-privileged account. There is support
138 for this in the Makefile. But if you want to run *everything* in the
139 lesser account, you don't need to bother with that.)
145 The many dependencies of Otter
146 ``````````````````````````````
148 These are partly because actix is a large piece of software with
149 much functionality. But also because I favoured my own programming
150 convenience and in some cases was experimenting with different
151 approaches. In practice, it seems to me that once I'm using Actix
152 and WASM and resvg and so on, there is not that much to be gained
153 by trying to prune the dependencies of the otter package itself.
155 geckodriver (for the automated in-browser tests)
156 ````````````````````````````````````````````````
158 This is done with a protocol called "WebDriver" which is a
159 cross-browser way to puppet a browser. There is a thing called
160 "geckodriver" which converts that to a firefox-specific protocol
161 for the same purpose, called "Marionette". (In practice all this
162 seems to have lots of bugs and misfeatures.)
164 AFAICT the usual approach for using geckodriver is to have it *bind to
165 a fixed TCP port accessible to all local programs*. My wrapper
166 tooling arranges to run this in an ephemeral $HOME and a private
169 AFAICT the only practical way to get geckodriver is to download the