Vae Guide

Vae Local Development Environment

The Vae Local Development Environment is a software package that you can install on your local computer. It allows you to preview pages that you are editing on your local machine. All VaeML tags are supported, and they will pull from the live data on your website.

The Vae Local Development Environment is implemented as a proxy server that transparently and quickly sends your local source code to the Vae servers to be processed. It does not actually perform rendering on your local machine, despite the fact that it may seem that way.

Installing

The Vae Local Development Environment is supported on all major desktop operating systems: Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX/Linux. If you use another operating system, contact your account manager and we'll try to get you up and running as well.

Installing on Mac OS X

Prerequisites: Installing on Mac OS X is supported on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion). Some people have made Vae work on OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) by manually installing the Apple Developer Tools, Ruby, and the Mongrel Ruby gem. You are welcome to give this a try. Make sure to get Ruby 1.8.7 or higher.

To install: Download the Vae Local Development Environment » here. Open the disk image and double click on the package file. Simply follow all the steps and the Vae Local Development Environment will be installed.

Installing on Windows

Prerequisites: The Vae Local Development Environment for Windows is supported on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

To install: Download the Vae Local Development Environment » here and run the installation package. Simply follow all the steps and the Vae Local Development Environment will be installed.

Installing on a UNIX/Linux system

Prerequisites: The Vae Local Development Environment for UNIX/Linux requires Ruby 1.8.5. You can check your Ruby version by typing ruby -v at the shell prompt. You should also have the Ruby Development Headers and a working compiler suite. If you do not have Ruby 1.8.5, use your distribution's package manager to install the latest version of Ruby and the Development Headers.

The Mongrel gem for Ruby is also required. To install it, please run: sudo gem install mongrel before installing the Vae Local Development Environment.

Download the Vae Local Development Environment » here. Untar the tarball and cd to the directory it contains. Simply run sudo ./install.sh and the Vae Local Development Environment will be installed.

Usage

The Vae Local Development Environment is typically run from the command line, and usually in conjunction with the Vae Subversion service. To start the Vae Local Preview Server, simply open a Terminal, cd to the folder containing your website and type vae.

If the current folder was checked out from the Vae Subversion service, Vae will be able to autodetect that it is a Vae site, the Vae site name (from the __vae.yml file in the folder) and your Vae username (from Subversion's records). If not, you will need to specify these options on the command line, as described in the next section.

You will be prompted to enter your Vae password (the password for the Vae user that was used to check out the Subversion working copy). This is a security feature that prevents anyone from accessing your data without your permission.

Once the password has been approved, your local preview server will be running on http://localhost:9999/. You can open a browser window and use your website locally.

Command Line Arguments

The vae command accepts command line options in standard UNIX style. Here are the available options:

Usage: vae [options]
    -u, --username <username>        Your Vae username
    -p, --port <port number>         Start server on this port
    -r, --root <path to site root>   Path to the root of the local copy of your Vae site.
    -s, --site <subdomain>           Vae subdomain for this site
    -h, --help                       Show this help message

Deploying the Subversion copy to your webspace

To deploy the version of your website as stored in Subversion to your webspace, simply type vae deploy. You will have to enter your Vae password to complete this step. If you are using the Vae Production Environment, please see the section below for more detailed commands.

Make sure that you have checked in all local files before running this command. If you are using branching folders inside your Subversion repository, make sure that you have properly set the active branch in the Site > FTP/Subversion tab.

You can also deploy from Subversion to your webspace directly on the Site > FTP/Subversion tab.

Vae Production Environment

If you are using the Vae Production Environment, there are more options available to you. Type vae stage to deploy the website from Subversion to the Staging Environment. Type vae release to release the Staging Environment to the Production Environment. Type vae stagerelease to deploy the website from Subversion to the Staging Environment and Production Environment.

Known Limitations

There are a few known limitations with the Vae Local Development Environment. We are researching how to best solve these problems, but for now, here is a list of the currently known limitations:

  • Using require, require_once, include, or include_once in PHP files will include the copy of that file as hosted on the FTP, not the local copy. As a workaround, store functions in the __vae.php file, as this will be processed normally. Alternatively, you can use the vae_include() function. Ask your account manager for more information.

  • PayPal and PayPal Express Checkout flow cannot be tested locally because it requires the external PayPal servers to be able to connect inward.