FOSSASIA

sTeam allows the creation of groups and joining, leaving and listing them. However these functions were only available in the web interface. My task involved the addition of these functions to the command line interface, that is, steam-shell. The task sounded like a difficult one because it involved coding out new commands for the shell and perform actions that have never been done before from the shell. This didn’t turn out to be true.

Issue: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/68

I began with using and understanding the group functions from the web interface. First I took up the command for the creation of groups. I listed the attributes needed by referring the web interface and then extended the create command already present in the shell to also create groups. The task turned out to be easy against what I thought earlier. This was because of the elegance of pike and modularity of the sTeam server. The code for creation of object was already present in the command and I had to pass the type of object that is group and write a few lines to accept the attributes required.

Next command was for the listing of groups, for this I created a new command called ‘group’ and inside the function called by group I switch cased on the next sub-command to find out if it was join, leave or list. After that I wrote the code to perform the action for each command in their respective cases. This is where the modularity of sTeam helped me a lot. The core portion of these functions turned out to be one liners.

Code to get a list of all groups:

array(object) groups = _Server->get_module(“groups”)->get_groups();

Code to join a group:

int result = group->add_member(me);

Code to leave a group:

group->remove_member(me);

Soon all my command were ready. I tested these and everything seemed to be working fine. I pushed my changes and created a new pull request. It was after this that Martin asked me to change the interface. He introduced me to MUDs, Multi User Dungeon. MUDs are type of text based games. The interface for sTeam is based on the these games and these are also an inspiration for the entire project. Just like MUDs create a virtual space we at sTeam create a virtual office space. This helped me to understand not only the interface but also the project. I will be talking more about this in my next blog. Anyways the standard interface is

<action> <object> <additional attributes>

I changed the interface and now the syntax for the commands are

Create a group: create group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> create group group_test
 How would you describe it?^Jtest group
 Subgroup of?^J
 /home/root>

List groups: list groups

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> list groups


Here is a list of all groups
abcd Admin coder Everyone Groups group_test
help justnow PrivGroups sTeam testg testg;
testGroup testing test_group WikiGroups

 /home/root>
 

Join a group: join group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> join group group_test
 Joined group group_test
 /home/root>
 

Leave a group: leave group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> leave group group_test
 /home/root>
 

Solution: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/pull/77

My objective was to write a script that will allow the user to open new files from inside the vim interface. There is a vim command available for normal files. However here I am not talking about normal files, these are files inside the steam structures, that is , inside rooms and containers. The commands that were doing this currently were edit.pike and the edit command from the steam-shell.

Issue opened: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/53

As I started working on it one of the issue I faced was that I could not use the code in edit.pike or the edit command in steam-shell because for that I would have had to start a new process and the vim window would have come up as an another new process. Due to these process using the same terminal window there would be an overlap and vim will not be able to function, this was one of the problems with the original implementation of the edit command, which I had solved in the first week of GsoC.

Issue with edit command: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/34
Solution: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/pull/36

My colleague Ajinkya Wavare had finished his task wherein we could execute pike code from a vim terminal. For this he had modified steam-shell and was passing the pike code as an argument to the call of steam-shell. One advantage of executing pike code this way is that all the steam objects and variables are available to use with the pike code. Basically it is like executing code on debug.pike. I based my solution to the problem on this newly added feature. I was able to pass in pike code to steam-shell, this would start a new process, execute the code and return me the output.

The tasks that I needed to do with the pike code was:

• Find the required object in the steam server.
• Get the content of the object.
• Save the content in a temporary file.
• Once the file is saved by vim, update the file on the sever and the logs in the vim buffer.

I created a new steam command ‘Open’ and passed the full path of the object as an argument. Given the full path it was easy to find the object on the sever. I was able to fetch the contents and save it in a file. Now I had a big problem. The name of the temporary file was available in the pike script, I needed this name in the vim script to open the file in a new tab. I spend more than a day trying to come up with a solution for this problem. I was able to get the name of the file in the output of the pike script and this output could be read into a vim buffer. However this output had a lot of other content including the result of execution of other pike statements also. I had to use vim search and select tools to get the file name isolated and stored in a vim script variable. Once I achieved this my task was almost done. I used vim command to open this file and the log in a new vim tab.

The next step was to get this file to be uploaded to the server and the logs updated. Ideally when a file is opened from the steam-shell using the edit command, there is a piece of code that gets called every one second and performs this tasks, however this couldn’t be used when the file is opened from inside vim as the steam-shell process that gets the file closes before the file is opened in vim. So I couldn’t have a pike script constantly watching the file. The solution I came up with was using auto commands to execute a pike script when the file is saved and update the file on the server and also the logs. This completed my task.

Since I had a day left in the week I took up one more small task. This was due to a problem that arose due to my previous task that is letting users open multiple files for editing. There were too many vim buffers open at a time and it was a trouble closing them as :q used to be executed for each buffer. Therefore I made a used defined command in vim, :Q, that was able to close tabs at a time. :tabclose is a vim command that does the same thing however it cannot close the last tab, this shortcoming was overcome with :Q.

Issue: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/62

solution: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/pull/65