DRG CMS system requirerments

Published on, September 05, 2018

For starter there will be at least five entries in this blog series.

Part one is about system requirements for DRG CMS. What system programs are needed to develop DRG CMS applications and how to install and configure them on development system.

Part two is about creating skeleton for internal portal application by using prepared jumpstart template.

In third part I try to explain how everything is connected together, which collections are required and what must be defined in collections documents.

Next part will be about creating a complex business application module as ruby gem and add it to existing portal.

One part will be about extending basic DRG model and adding additional fields to it, add fields to edit form and update CMS menu.

At last I will explain how to prepare production and stage environment and install application into those environments.

Since I do most of my development and production on Ubuntu Linux , instructions are made for this operating system. I believe there should be no problem finding similar instructions for other variations of Linux or even Apple OS. I was able to run development environment on Windows OS, but after that there were problems that could not be resolved easily. First of them is speed, so I didn't even bother to dig any further.

System tools

Since ruby gems often automatically compiles part of code, default compiling tools must be installed.

Node.js is required by Rails for executing javascript code.

Git is by far, the most widely used modern version control system in the world today. I also use it for installing code to production environment.

sudo apt install build-essential nodejs git

MongoDB

MongoDB is leading NoSQL document database. It’s ridiculously easy to install and use and as you grow, you will learn advanced functions that you thought were reserved only for big SQL databases. Instructions for installing MongoDB on Ubuntu Linux can be found here. Installation is easy as

sudo apt install -y mongodb

If you want to be more flexible about installing different versions of application I would suggest official MongoDB instructions here.

Ruby and Rails

Installing Ruby has become non problematic for last couple of years. Ruby advances minor version every year around Christmas time. Since it is mature language, developers mainly concentrate on increasing speed with minor improvements and not to break anything major. Last, 2.5.x Ruby version, is already installed by default on Ubuntu 18.04. and everything works as expected.

You can check which Ruby version is installed on your system:

ruby -v

If Ruby is not installed type this into command line:

sudo apt install ruby-full

Ruby comes with it’s own library packaging called Ruby gems. To install Rails you just need to install rails and bundler gems. But first lets disable automatic creating gem documentation every time new gem is installed. This will speedup installing gems for several times.

sudo echo 'gem: --no-document' >> /etc/gemrc

Now lets install Ruby on Rails

sudo gem install bundler rails

Thats it. Your computer should be prepared for next step. Create portal application skeleton in few minutes.