The London Perl and Raku Workshop takes place on 26th Oct 2024. If your company depends on Perl, please consider sponsoring and/or attending.
GETTY / App-DuckPAN-0.118 / README.md

DuckPAN

The DuckDuckHack Testing Tool

DuckPAN is an application built to provide developers a testing environment for DuckDuckHack Instant Answers. It allows you to test instant answer triggers and preview their visual design and output.

Disclaimer

Currently, DuckPAN has been developed on, and works well with Ubuntu. More specifically, we regularly build, test and run DuckPAN on Ubuntu 12.04. We have also successfully installed and run DuckPAN on older and newer Ubuntu releaseses, e.g. Ubuntu 10.04, 12.10, and 13.04.

Developers have also been successful running DuckPAN on other Linux distros (e.g. Arch, Debian), but we make no promises that it will work outside of Ubuntu.

As well, there have been reported issues with installing DuckPAN on Mac OSX and Windows, so we don't recommend you go down that path.

That being said, we are more than willing to help you debug any installation problems, so please come to us with your problems and we'll try to get your issues sorted out. If you'd like some help from our community, feel free to engage with them on the DuckDuckGo forum

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with DuckPAN is to either:

If you're going to use our virtual machine please continue reading. If not, go setup your OS and continue with the DuckPAN installation instructions below.

DuckDuckHack Development Virtual Machine

The purpose of our DuckDuckHack VM is to provide a sandbox for DuckDuckGo Instant Answer development that is quick to set up and start working with.

DDH VM Breakdown

For VirtualBox hosts

ddh-vbox.rar
MD5: 1734373cbecc5820bb7d18406eb42854
https://ddg-community.s3.amazonaws.com/ddh-vbox.rar

For VMWare hosts

ddh-vmw.rar:
MD5: 95ad9acfacadb4b0cb0cf23ffaa3516e
https://ddg-community.s3.amazonaws.com/ddh-vmw.rar

Roadmap

Using the Virtual Machine

To use the Virtual Machine, you will need to download and install VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player, depending on your current OS.

VirtualBox (free)

Website: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Supports: Windows, OSX, Linux

Setup Instructions

  1. Download the rar and verify the checksum--decompress: This archive contains the VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files.

  2. Open VirtualBox, click "File" and then click "Import Appliance"

  3. Click "Open appliance..." and select the DuckDuckHack virtual appliance -- click "Next"

  4. Click "Import"

VMWare Player (free)

Website: https://www.vmware.com/products/player/
Supports: Windows, Linux

Setup Instructions

1.Download the rar and verify the checksum--decompress: This contains the VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files.

2.Open VMWare Player, and click "Open a Virtual Machine"

3.Choose a storage path for the Virtual Machine -- click "Import"

Happy Hacking!

Once you have installed the virtual machine you should be able to startup the VM and login with the following credentials:

The DuckPAN client has already been installed for you. You can now clone the instant answer repos and start developing/testing.

Installing DuckPAN

**Note: You don't need to install DuckPAN if you're using our DuckDuckHack virtual machine. It's already installed for you!

To install DuckPan, open your terminal and run:

curl http://duckpan.org/install.pl | perl

This script will setup local::lib, which is a way to install Perl modules without changing your base Perl installation. If you already use local::lib or perlbrew, don't worry, this script will intelligently use what you already have.

If you didn't have a local::lib before running the install script, you will need to run the script twice. It should tell you when like this:

please now re-login to your user account and run it again!

If everything works, you should see this at the end:

EVERYTHING OK! You can now go hacking! :)

Note that with local::lib now installed, you can easily install Perl modules with cpanm.

cpanm App::DuckPAN
App::DuckPAN is up to date.

Dealing With Installation Issues

If during the course of your DuckPAN install you run into errors, don't panic, there are a few things you can try.

First, try running the install command again (curl http://duckpan.org/install.pl | perl), this often solves issues related to any dependencies.

If that doesn't work, you should investigate the build.log and see what's wrong. It might be a depencency issue which you can resolve by manually installing whichever dependency is missing via cpanm.

If it still won't install with cpanm try adding --notest to the cpanm command:

cpanm Test::More --notest

If that still doesn't work, you can also try using --force:

cpanm Test::More --force

If this still doesn't work, please create a GitHub Issue in the DuckPAN Repo here. Be sure to paste the contents of your build.log and also let us know the details of your OS ($ uname -a is great). Once you've made the issue, we'll work with you to try and solve any problems you're having.

Using DuckPAN

Install Commands

duckpan installdeps

Install all requirements of the specific DuckDuckHack project (if possible), like zeroclickinfo-spice, zeroclickinfo-goodie, duckduckgo or community-platform

duckpan check

Check if you fulfill all requirements for the development environment (this is run automatically during setup)

Plugin Testing

duckpan query

Test goodies and spice triggers interactively on the command line

duckpan server

Test spice plugins on a local web server (for design/layout purposes)

Advanced Features

duckpan env

View env commands and also shows the env variables currently stored in ~/.duckpan/env.ini

duckpan env <name> <value>

Add an environment variable that duckpan will remember. Useful for spice API keys. Variables are stored in ~/.duckpan/env.ini

duckpan env <name>

Retrieve the matching key for a given env variable.

duckpan env rm <name>

Remove an environment variable from duckpan

duckpan release

Release the project of the current directory to DuckPAN