Play With Inqlude Local Environment

Inqlude is a tool to handle Qt based libraries. It provides developers an easy way to find, install, and use libraries, in particular third party libraries. A public version of the library runs at http://inqlude.org. 

The website is written in static HTML and so there also is an option to generate an HTML overview of all available libraries. This can be hosted or used locally. In this blog post, I am going to explain how it can be done. 

At first, I thought that we require a Sinatra server or a Tomcat server to host this locally.  After getting it clarified from the mentor, I was able to generate the pages and browse it from the file system. This guide would definitely help you try that.

Step 1

Create a specific directory at a preferred place in your file system. I have named the directory as 'myproject'. Clone the Inqlude github repository into it. 

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~$ mkdir myproject
nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~$ cd myproject/
nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~/myproject$ git clone https://github.com/cornelius/inqlude.git
Cloning into 'inqlude'...
remote: Counting objects: 1684, done.
remote: Total 1684 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 1684
Receiving objects: 100% (1684/1684), 292.55 KiB | 210.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1085/1085), done.
Checking connectivity... done.           

Step 2

Navigate into the 'myproject' directory where you will see a new directory called 'inqlude'. This contains the repository that is cloned.

Step 3

There is a command line client, written in Ruby. It can download Qt libraries, but it is mostly aimed at maintaining the inqlude data. This client is also useful to execute inqlude commands using inqlude executable. It is available as a Ruby gem, so you need to install rubygems first. Use the following command if you have not installed Ruby and Rubygems in your machine. Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu use the apt package manager. You can use it like this:

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~$ sudo apt-get install ruby-full

Step 4

Now you can install the inqlude gem executable. 

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~$ sudo gem install inqlude

Step 5

Now you can play with inqlude commands. You can get help about the available inqlude commands using the following command. 

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~/myproject$ cd inqlude/
nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~/myproject/inqlude$ inqlude
Commands:
  inqlude create <manifest_name> [version] [release_date]               # Create new or updated manifest
  inqlude create_kde_frameworks <frameworks-git-checkout> <output_dir>  # Create manifests from git checkout of KDE frameworks module in given ...
  inqlude download                                                      # Download source code archive
  inqlude get_involved                                                  # Information about how to get involved
  inqlude help [COMMAND]                                                # Describe available commands or one specific command
  inqlude install                                                       # Install library
  inqlude list                                                          # List libraries
  inqlude release_kde_frameworks <release_date> <version>               # Create release manifests for KDE frameworks release
  inqlude review <repo>                                                 # Review pull requests on GitHub. Use 'username:branch' as repo parameter.
  inqlude show <library_name>                                           # Show library details
  inqlude system_scan                                                   # Scan system for installed Qt libraries and create manifests
  inqlude uninstall                                                     # Uninstall library
  inqlude verify [filename]                                             # Verify all manifests or specific file if filename is given
  inqlude view -o, --output-dir=OUTPUT_DIR                              # Create view

Options:
  [--version], [--no-version]    # Show version
  [--offline], [--no-offline]    # Work offline
  [--manifest-dir=MANIFEST_DIR]  # Manifest directory

You can find all the available inqlude commands there. Let's try one of them. 

If you want to know how you use install command with inqlude, use the following command.

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~/myproject/inqlude$ inqlude help install
Usage:
  inqlude install

Options:
  [--dry-run], [--no-dry-run]    # Only show what would happen, don't install anything.
  [--version], [--no-version]    # Show version
  [--offline], [--no-offline]    # Work offline
  [--manifest-dir=MANIFEST_DIR]  # Manifest directory

Install library

Step 7

You have one last thing to do to view the website locally. Use the following command and it will generate the output views of pages in a new directory called  OUTPUT_DIR which will be created inside inqlude directory. Otherwise, you can specify the OUTPUT_DIR instead of using that name.

nanduni@nanduni-TECRA-M11:~/myproject/inqlude$ inqlude view --output-dir=OUTPUT_DIR
Creating web site in 'OUTPUT_DIR' from '/home/nanduni/.local/share/inqlude/manifests'

You will notice that a new directory called OUTPUT_DIR has been created. This contains the html views of all pages in view directory. For each html.haml page in view directory, a new html page has been created inside OUTPUT_DIR. Now you are able to view these pages through browser.

You can modify the code and look for those corresponding changes locally as well. Hope this guide would be useful for newbies to Inqlude.