Washing C++ code

I spent most of the day hunched at my laptop, checking out git branches trying to rebase commits to clean up the project I’m working on, but I haven’t been having much success. I did, have some good progress with automated documentation and code review tools, as well as some Docker stuff.

I found an interesting presentation by a dev named Uilian Ries titled Creating C++ applications with Gitlab CI, which is exactly what I’m hoping to do. He mentions tools such as Cppcheck, Clang Tidy, and Doxygen. Now I remember something about automated documentation generators during one of my CS classes a couple semesters ago, but let me say that I really should have paid more attention.

Uilian goes into a lot more during his presentation that I didn’t get into today, but I did start to work on automating the build process using Docker. One of the problems that I’ve run into with the original Cryptonote forks is that it was built for Ubuntu 16, using an older version of the Boost library. I haven’t quite figured out how to get the builds to work on Ubuntu 18, and keeping an older distro running somewhere isn’t really an effective use of time. I already had Docker setup on a home server, so I was able to spin a copy up, clone my repo, install build prereqs and go to town.

docker run --name pk_redux -it ubuntu:16.04
root@5a1d66905643:/#
apt-get update 
apt-get install git
git clone https://gitlab.com/pk_redux/pkcli.git
cd pkcli
apt install screen make cmake build-essential libboost-all-dev pkg-config libssl-dev libzmq3-dev libunbound-dev libsodium-dev libminiupnpc-dev libreadline6-dev libldns-dev
make
.build/release/src/pkdaemon

My next step here is to save these commands into a Dockerfile or docker-compose file that I can start building off of, adding the code checks and documentation generators as needed. Once I’ve verified the syntax and worked out any bugs, I should be able to start adding things to the Gitlab CI YML files as well. This should help keep the project well-maintained and clean.

I’ve been familiar with Docker for some time, but it’s been a long time since I last messed around with it. It’s really exciting, to be able to document everything, and be able to spin up containers without polluting my base system.