5. Engine Installation & Execution

For intallting the engine, there are two options:

  • One is using the compiled version provided in the project under the ‘bin’ folder of the engine repository. This is ready to run in linux operating systems for AMD64 cpu architecture.

  • Or compiling the source code. This option is better if you want to run it in a different operating system (OS) or cpu architecture. To do so, you should be aware that one of the libraries of this project (‘zeromq/goczmq’) is a wrapper of a C library, so you have to have a C compiler for the operating system (OS) and cpu architecture installed too.

5.1. Compiling the Project

If you want to compile the project, the first thing you need is to install GO. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, you will need the C compiler in place for the OS and cpu architecture. Go allows compiling the project for several different architectures and operating systems, but the mentioned library can do the things a bit harder (especially when you compile the project for a different OS and CPU architecture of your machine). If you have a message error like this at building time:

build constraints exclude all Go files in ../go/pkg/mod/gopkg.in/zeromq/goczmq.v4@v4.X.X

the cause may be the lack of the right C compiler in place.

For compiling the project, this tutorial can be of interest to you, but for this project you can do just the following (provided you are in the root folder of the project):

go build -o {{the place you want to put the executable file}} cmd/main.go

or just make (or make build)

For compiling to a different target system, you should check the following links:

But in general, you should take into account that you might need to specify the flags CC, CXX, and CGO_ENABLED="1"; apart from the GOOS and GOARCH as described in the tutorial cited previously.

5.2. Location of Configuration Files

The main configuration file for the engine is the engine_config.yml, and by default the engine tries to get it from ./config (config folder in the folder where the executable file is located). However, this can be changed using some command line options, as we are going to see in the next section.

The conversation rules folder location is described in that configuration file, so it is up to you. This topic is described in detail in Conversation Rules

If you import this project in an IDE, the engine tries to get the configuration file from the config folder of the project. This is only possible if the env (environment) command line option is defined as DEV.

5.3. Launch Engine and Command Line Options

As mentioned, the engine can use command line flags to start. The three command line optines are:

  • -env (environment): It tells the engine if the it is running in an IDE ( DEV) or not.

  • -nobanner (no banner): If present, the banner will not be printed at the beginning of the execution.

  • -config (config): If present, it change the default location of the configuration file engine_config.yml. If this is provided, the env option will not be used. You can use a different name for that configuration file instead of the default one, since the path is not the location (folder) of the file, is directly the file to be used as configuration file (but always a .yml file).

The default and the alternative values are defined in the following table:

Command Line Option

Default value

Alternative values

env

PRO

DEV

nobanner

(not present)

nobanner (present)

config

(not present)

/path/to/the/configuration/file/configuration_file_name.yml

To start the execution of the engine, there are two options:

  • If the software is not compiled, you can compile and run it by doing go run cmd/main.go or just make run (provided that you have the environment ready for compilation as described in the previous section)

  • If the software is compiled, just run it as any executable. An example using the already compile version in linux:

    bin/slv_engine_linux_amd64

    or using the command line options:

    bin/slv_engine_linux_amd64 -config=/home/alber/SecLopeDeVega/engine/config/engine_config.yml -nobanner

5.4. Database Setup

The schema of the database to be used is already provided in the db folder in the repository. If you do not know how to import it in your project, check this guide.