YARRG development, contribution and troubleshooting

Free Software (aka Open Source) licensing

YARRG is Free Software - you may share and modify it. See the licences for details. Not only the client but also the website code is Free. The yarrg client, support files, and so forth are under the GNU GPL (v3 or later); the website and database backend is under the GNU Affero GPL (v3 or later).

Note that there is NO WARRANTY !

Resources for developers

Source code

The website and upload client are maintained at https://gitlab.com/yarrg.

Live website source code can be downloaded: In case we have made changes but not yet pushed them (perhaps because we haven't done a release), and to make it easy for anyone else who runs a copy of the website to provide everyone with the source for their version, the website code itself lets you download an up-to-date of its actually-running source code. So this link gives you the source code for the pages you are now looking at.

Uploader

The uploader is also Free Software, but under a slightly different licence. The uploader page has complete information on how to get its source code.

YARRG website code instances

Lookup website

• Main released site, with source code (and committed changes via git)
• Released code; testing database instance (updated with yarrg --test-servers) (source code as above)
• Testing version of the site code, with source code (and committed changes via git)
• Testing code running against the testing database instance (source code as above)

You can add the form parameter ?debug=1 to each of the website URLs above to get a version of the site with debugging output enabled.

Database and dictionary update receiver

On the live system there are different trees, potentially with different versions, for receiving updates and managing the database, to the ones for displaying the website. The database management trees are normally accessed only via the upload client but you may also download their source directly:

• Main production instance including uncommitted changes; or committed changes via git
• Testing database instance including uncommitted changes; or committed changes via git

Data

rsync rsync.yarrg.chiark.net::yarrg/
accesses files published for the benefit of the old yarrg upload client and other members of the ypp-sc-tools family.

This directory also contains slightly stale copies (updated daily) of the actual databases (in SQLite3 format). It is also available by http but please do not repeatedly download the databases by http - use rsync which is much more efficient. Note also that if you want to actually run your own improved yarrg website, I can arrange to feed you data in real time - see below.

rsync rsync.yarrg.chiark.net::yarrg/test/
accesses the data for the testing instance.

Documentation

README.devel has the specification of the mechanism and format for uploading to YARRG.

Support from the YARRG team

If there are problems, considering filing a ticket on gitlab Merge requests are very welcome.

If you would like to run a (perhaps modified) copy of the YARRG website it would be very easy for us to make our system send you copies of updates submitted by users of the YARRG clients including JARRG, in the format expected by the YARRG code. Please just ask us - at our end it's just a matter of us adding your database instance's special email address to our alias file.

We encourage the development and improvement of this code. Please continue to share your improvements with the Puzzle Pirates community. In particular, do not remove or break the feature that allows users of your website to download the up to date code you are running.

Contacting the YARRG developers

Email Ian Jackson ijackson (at) chiark.greenend.org.uk. Or talk to any Fleet Officer or above of the crew Special Circumstances on the Cerulean Ocean.