0. Introduction

   The Lodge is a Ruby on Rails project with two primary goals, 1. a place for me to play with and learn Ruby on Rails, and 2. to develop a useful campaign management tool for the Pathfinder tabletop RPG.

1. Setting up a development environment

   First things first, be sure you have Ruby and Rails installed. This is being developed using the following versions,

Ruby: 1.9.2p180 Rails: 3.0.6

It is recommended to user RVM to install Ruby. RVM makes it easy to manage multiple versions of Ruby on a single development machine.

After downloading the source and installing Ruby & Rails, be sure to run 'bundle install' from the root directory.

config/database.yml Setup your database information in this file. A database.yml.example file is provided for your convenience. It contains setup for a simple sqlite3 database.

config/site.yml This file must be setup to provide a number of environtment-specific or secure properties. A sample file - config/site.yml.example - is provided for convenience. Simply copy this file and overwrite the values with your own.

After your yml files are setup, run 'rake db:create' and 'rake db:migrate' to create your initial database. If you get errors while running these commands, it may be due to your rake version. This project currently requires rake 0.8.7. You can uninstall rake using 'gem uninstall rake' and reinstall the correct version with 'gem install rake -v 0.8.7', or you can user RVM to create a new gemset for the correct version.

Finally, run 'rails s' to start your local server.

2. Creating an admin account

   The database setup scripts don't create an initial account. To create your own, load http://localhost:3000/register in your browser. Enter an email address and password, click create user, and you're all set. This creates an admin user account. Don't worry, though, after a first user is created, users may no longer self-register like this. Additional users must be invited from the Users page, and will not be admin users unless explicitly set as such.