A Gentle Introduction to the CRE Forge

Private and Public projects

The CRE Forge hosts numerous private and public projects. It is possible to access all the information of a public project in read-only mode for every user in the world through the web interface. To get write access to the project's information, you need to:

• create a gforge account.
• request write access to one of the project admins

The information publicly accessible for private projects is limited to their homepage. Note that private projects are not listed on the CRE Forge front page. Their cvs or subversion repositories are not accessible to anyone but their members. Access to their mailing lists requires explicit admin approval. To get read or write access to such a project, you need to:

• create a gforge account.
• request write access to one of the project admins

Creating an account

You need to create an account if you want to:

• have read or write access to any private project
• have write access to any public project

To do so, go to the front page and click on the "Create Account" link located in the top right corner of the page. Fill in the fields and click on the "Submit" button located at the bottom of the page. You will receive a confirmation email a short time later that contains important information to complete the creation of your account.

Once your account has been created, you can access it through the following webpage: https://creforge.com/my/

Creating a project

You might want to create a private project if you want to control the list of people who have read or write access to the information stored in that project. If you just want to join an existing project, see the section "Joining a project".

To create a project, you need to create an account. Please, make sure you have followed the steps described in the "Creating an account" section.

Once your account is created, you can create a project by going to your personal page: https://creforge.com/my/. Of course, to do this, you need to be logged in the website so you might need to enter your username and password to get access to this webpage. On this webpage, click on the "Register Project" link which is located in the left to middle part of the screen, right below the "My Page" tab. Fill in the fields.

Pay special attention to the "SCM" (This acronym stands for Source Code Management) and "Project Visibility" fields. The "SCM" field cannot be changed once the project has been created. The "Project Visibility" field can be changed but it is very hard to do so. If you are unsure about which field to choose (cvs vs. svn and public vs. private), you should consider the following cases:

• if you are okay with everyone on earth being able to access your data as read-only, you can choose a "Public" repository.
• if you want to make sure only a selected number of people can modify your data, you can choose either a "Public" or a "Private" repository. Only the users you give permission to will be able to write in it.
• if you don't know what cvs or subversion is, you can choose cvs.
• if you don't know what subversion is, you can choose cvs.
• if you know what cvs and subversion are, you can choose svn.

Once the fields are filled, hit the "Submit" button. Your project has now been submitted to the CRE Forge admins. To be approved, the project must be related to osCommerce in general or CRE Loaded specifically.

When the project is approved, you will receive numerous confirmation emails that will contain important information regarding your access to the various services hosted by the server. Do not delete them! Specifically, the mailing-list administration interface requires a special magic password (which you can change) which is contained in one of these emails.

It should be noted that once the project has been approved, it might not have been fully created yet. Specifically, the cvs and svn repositories might not work yet. If in doubt, please, wait 24 hours after reception of the project creation confirmation emails before you try to use the project.

Joining a project

To join a project, you need to:

• create an account
• ask the project administrator to add you as a member of the project.
• if you are going to actively participate you should also "Configure your ssh access".

To create an account, please, make sure you have followed the steps described in the "Creating an account" section. To be added as a member of the project, send an email to the project's administrator(s). Note, do not send these requests to the CRE Forge site administration team.

Configure your ssh access

If you want to:

• use the cvs or the svn repositories
• modify the project homepage
• upload files to your private homedir

Please, consider the fact that the update of your ssh key is not instantaneous. Just like a lot of operations on the GForge server, this action is performed by server-side scripts which are automatically run regularly but which cannot be run too often due to their very high cost in terms of server ressources.

Creating a cvs repository

If you have chosen the cvs option in the project creation page, and if you want to use your cvs repository, you need to create a cvs module to store your files in. There are two cases:

• you have never used cvs before.
• you already have another cvs repository stored on another server/machine and you want to import its previous history.

If you have never used cvs before, you should read the cvs manual. Typically, to import a new module in your cvs repository on a Unix machine:

• mkdir <your_module_name>
• cd <your_module_name>
• cvs -d :ext:<your_username>@scm.creforge.com:/cvsroot/<your_project> import <your_module_name> foo bar

If you want to import the previous history, follow the steps described in FAQ question 3.

Once you have imported a new module, you can access it by following the instructions located in the SCM page. To access the SCM page, go to your project page, http://creforge.com/projects/<your_project>, and click on the "SCM" tab located in the top right of the page.

To add and deal with the data located in this module, you need to use the CVS add, remove, update and commit commands. Read the cvs manual for more information on these commands.

Creating a svn repository

When your project creation is completed (see question 8 in the FAQ), if you have chosen the "svn" option in the project creation page, your repository is ready to be used. There are three cases:

• you have never used svn or cvs before.
• you already have another svn repository stored on another server/machine and you want to import the previous history in your new svn repository located on the gforge servers.
• you have already another cvs repository stored on another server/machine and you want to import the previous cvs history in your shiny new svn repository.

If you have never used svn before, then you can start using it right away as explained in the "SCM" tab of your project. To access the SCM page, go to your project page, http://creforge.com/projects/<your_project>, and click on the "SCM" tab located in the top right of the page. For example, to checkout a local copy of this repository and start using it, you could do this:

• svn checkout svn+ssh://<your_username>@scm.creforge.com/svn/<your_project>
• cd <your_project>
• touch foo (create the file named foo)
• svn add foo
• svn commit -m "<your_message>"

If you want to import the previous history from an existing svn repository, follow the steps described in the FAQ.

If you want to convert your cvs history into a svn repository, follow the steps described in the FAQ.

Once you have imported a new module, you can access it by following the instructions located in the SCM page. To access the SCM page, go to your project page, http://creforge.com/projects/<your_project>, and click on the "SCM" tab located in the top right of the page.

To add and deal with the data located in this module, you need to use a number of different svn commands. Read the svn manual for more information on how to use them.

On windows, we recommend you use the Tortoise graphical utility to access your cvs or subversion repository. See our tortoise webpage for information on how to install and use it.