The Blue Alliance is a FIRST Robotics tool to help teams scout for, compete at, and relive competitions. You can see how the whole site works here, or even write code to make it better!

0. Join https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/thebluealliance-developers to stay up to date with development
1. Fork this project!
2. Make your changes on a branch.
3. Make changes!
4. Send pull request from your fork.
5. We'll review it, and push your changes to the site!

If you're having trouble getting set up, reach out to us at our mailing list and we'll help you through it!

0. Learn a bit about Git and GitHub:
   • GitHub help
   • Try Git
1. Install App Engine
   • Specifically use the Python SDK
   • Run installer and allow it make symbolic links (you will be asked to enter your root password)
2. Get the latest version of The Blue Alliance
   • First make sure you have forked TBA by clicking on "Fork" in the top right of the page
   • Run git clone git://github.com/username/the-blue-alliance.git where username is your GitHub username
   • For detailed instructions see the GitHub guide on contributing
3. Import the project into Google App Engine Launcher
   • By default TBA uses port 8088, make sure your local setup is consistent with this
4. Run the app in App Engine
5. Get some test data: In your terminal console, from the the-blue-alliance directory, run the following command
   • paver setup (Make sure that you already have Paver installed)
6. You should now have a basic development installation!
   • Visit localhost:8088 to see your local version of The Blue Alliance
   • Visit localhost:8088/admin/debug to run more commands and populate your install with extra data

Paver is an easy way automate repetitive tasks. For The Blue Alliance, these tasks are stored in pavement.py. To install paver, use one of the methods below:

• Download and install paver from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Paver/
• Run easy_install Paver

• paver clean - Deletes artifacts that the app creates that you don't need.

If possible, icons are combined into single files called sprites to reduce the number of requests needed to render a page. To simplify development, we add icons normally (not to the sprite), and every so often we will combine them all into a sprite and fix all necessary CSS. Potentially useful: http://spriteme.org/

The CSS files are compiled from LESS to ease in development. Make sure you have Node Package Manager installed, and install lessc by running npm install -g less. Now, you can run paver less to compile the LESS into CSS.

Once the LESS files are compressed into CSS, we combine the resulting file with other precompiled CSS files. Similarly, we combine all relevant JavaScript files into a single file and compress them. This means that whenever changes are made to CSS or JavaScript, you must run of the following:

• paver less
• paver javascript
• paver make (builds both LESS and JS)

Testing is implemented using a combination of unittest2 and the Google App Engine testbed framework. Test coverage is a work in progress, and focuses on maintaining datafeed integrity in the face of optimizations and changes to FIRST's data formats.

To run the tests, or just the offline (fast) tests:

• paver test
• paver test_fast