Prerequisites

You must install the following software:

• A current, supported release of Go,
• staticcheck,
• shadow,
• unparam,
• govulncheck,
• Fossil,
• Git (so that Go can download some dependencies).

See folder docs/development (a zettel box) for details.

Clone the repository

Most of this is covered by the excellent Fossil documentation.

1. Create a directory to store your Fossil repositories. Let's assume, you have created $HOME/fossils.
2. Clone the repository: fossil clone https://zettelstore.de/ $HOME/fossils/zettelstore.fossil.
3. Create a working directory. Let's assume, you have created $HOME/zettelstore.
4. Change into this directory: cd $HOME/zettelstore.
5. Open development: fossil open $HOME/fossils/zettelstore.fossil.

Tools to build, test, and manage

In the directory tools there are some Go files to automate most aspects of building and testing, (hopefully) platform-independent.

The build script is called as:

go run tools/build/build.go [-v] COMMAND

The flag -v enables the verbose mode. It outputs all commands called by the tool.

Some important COMMANDs are:

• build: builds the software with correct version information and puts it into a freshly created directory bin.
• check: checks the current state of the working directory to be ready for release (or commit).
• version: prints the current version information.

Therefore, the easiest way to build your own version of the Zettelstore software is to execute the command

go run tools/build/build.go build

In case of errors, please send the output of the verbose execution:

go run tools/build/build.go -v build

Other tools are:

• go run tools/clean/clean.go cleans your Go development worspace.
• go run tools/check/check.go executes all linters and unit tests. If you add the option -r linters are more strict, to be used for a release version.
• go run tools/devtools/devtools.go install all needed software (see above).
• go run tools/htmllint/htmllint.go [URL] checks all generated HTML of a Zettelstore accessible at the given URL (default: http://localhost:23123).
• go run tools/testapi/testapi.go tests the API against a running Zettelstore, which is started automatically.

A note on the use of Fossil

Zettelstore is managed by the Fossil version control system. Fossil is an alternative to the ubiquitous Git version control system. However, Go seems to prefer Git and popular platforms that just support Git.

Some dependencies of Zettelstore, namely Zettelstore client, webs, sx, and sxwebs are also managed by Fossil. Depending on your development setup, some error messages might occur.

If the error message mentions an environment variable called GOVCS you should set it to the value GOVCS=zettelstore.de:fossil (alternatively more generous to GOVCS=*:all). Since the Go build system is coupled with Git and some special platforms, you allow ot to download a Fossil repository from the host zettelstore.de. The build tool set GOVCS to the right value, but you may use other go commands that try to download a Fossil repository.

On some operating systems, namely Termux on Android, an error message might state that an user cannot be determined (cannot determine user). In this case, Fossil is allowed to download the repository, but cannot associate it with an user name. Set the environment variable USER to any user name, like: USER=nobody go run tools/build.go build.