Personally, I prefer working with Vagrant. Thanks to @rhelmer, here is his repo b2g-vagrant. It contains a vagrant configure file and puppet file. The README file is quite comprehensive, but please notice, it will download a box file over 10G when you run vagrant up the first time.
Vagrant provides a clean way to develop, however, it is not convenient to connect to VM. I have to go to the vagrant folder and vagrant ssh.
vagrant-proxyssh is a hack to use ssh directly from command line. If you do not like to install it, copy and paste the following words into your ~/.ssh/config
Now, I can use ssh vagrant to connect to VM directly. I also would like to mount remote folder to local machine using sshfs.
The command is quite simple:
*sshfs vagrant:/home/vagrant/src/B2G/gaia ~/gaia -oauto_cache,reconnect,defer_permissions,negative_vncache,volname=gaia*
Next, let us see how to host gaia in Apache (All the code in this part comes from gaia-hacking, I just make it short)
sudo apt-get install apache2
Create host config file /etc/apache2/sites-available/gaiamobile.org
Run the following commands in order
sudo a2enmod expires
sudo a2enmod vhost_alias
sudo a2ensite gaiamobile.org
sudo apache2ctl graceful
We need to modify Vagrant configure file to visit apache from local machine. Add the next line in Vagrant configure file
config.vm.forward_port 80, 4567
And run vagrant reload. Then we can visit 127.0.0.1:4567.
To see real gaia interface, add following lines in /etc/hosts, and open homescreen.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 homescreen.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 dialer.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 sms.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 browser.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 maps.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 camera.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 gallery.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 video.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 market.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 music.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 settings.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 clock.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 crystalskull.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 penguinpop.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 towerjelly.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 wikipedia.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 cnn.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 bbc.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 nytimes.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 calculator.gaiamobile.org
127.0.0.1 system.gaiamobile.org
For more detail about hacking Gaia, please go to gaia-hacking.
If you are a lazy man like me and you are using Mac, maybe you like to have a working B2G browser. @pauljt provides a build of b2g desktop for Mac OS in mac-b2g-desktop.
All previous work is to prepare the dev env. It is time to meet Gaia.
Go to Gaia folder and modify Makefile. Set DEBUG to 1 and Port to 4567. Then run make. It will do a lot of work and what we need is the profile it generates.
That’s all. Open your browser with the profile we just get
/Applications/B2G.app/Contents/MacOS/b2g -profile ~/gaia/profile
We will get the window just like the image in the beginning in this post.