Getting Started with Origen

The Initial Commit

Origen applications should be configured with details of the revision control repository that they will be checked into, this will enable the following features:

• A release command which will tag and perform common post-release tasks.
• A common project-level history will be maintained, regardless of the underlying system used.
• An API for programmatic control of the revision control system, this provides application and plugin developers with a common API to call regardless of the underlying system that a given application uses - Revision Control API.
• A common command, origen rc to provide a common interface for application users to perform basic revision control operations regardless of their proficiency with the underlying system.

Origen currently supports integration with the following revision control tools:

• Git
• DesignSync

We would like to add support for Subversion and any other commonly used systems. If you have knowledge of how an additional target revision control system works and you would like to be involved in developing and piloting a driver for it, please get in touch via the community channels.

Having said that, the Origen core team recommends using Git, even if you have had little or no experience of it so far. It has significant advantages and is fast becoming the de facto standard revision control tool used in software engineering.

Configuration information for your application resides in config/application.rb and an initial version of this file will have been created for you.

This file contains a lot of configuration options which you should find fairly well commented. The option that defines the revision control system is called rc_url and it should be set as follows.

For Git:

# config/application.rb

# Example for Github
config.rc_url = "git@github.com:myaccount/myapp.git"
# Example for Atlassian Stash
config.rc_url = "ssh://git@sw-stash.mycompany.net/myproject/myapp.git"

For DesignSync:

# config/application.rb

config.rc_url = "sync://sync-1234:1234/myproject/myapp"

Origen will maintain a history log for your application at doc/history. The name of the person who did each release will be recorded if Origen can work out who you are (your name will also included within generated pattern headers and similar).

Setting up your username and email in Git is the recommend way, even if you don’t actually use Git for the given application. You can set these details by executing the following commands:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

If you don’t have Git available then alternatively you can set the following environment variables:

ORIGEN_USER_NAME  = "John Doe"
ORIGEN_USER_EMAIL = "johndoe@example.com"

If you are using the Windows Linux Subsystem and have your WSL login different from your corporate login you could also set the ORIGEN_USER_ID environment variable in your .bashrc / .tcshrc file

ORIGEN_USER_ID = "jdoe"

You can test whether your changes have been picked up by opening an Origen console (origen i) and running the following:

User.current.name    # => "John Doe"
User.current.email   # => "johndoe@example.com"
User.current.id      # => "jdoe"

An alternative path to determining your details could be via your company’s employee directory system. Origen’s company configuration settings allows the credentials for an LDAP system to be entered, and this approach is used within NXP to identify the current user. We are not sure if the current support for this within Origen is generic enough to apply to other companies or not, please get in touch if you are interested to help further develop and pilot this system for use within your company.

With your repository and user details setup, we can now do an initial commit and tag.

cd myapp

origen rc init

We are now ready to tag, to do this simply execute the following command and follow the prompts:

origen rc tag

At this point Origen will send an email to your application’s maillist to notify them of the new release.

Your commit history will be saved in your history file which by default lives at doc/history.

The content of that file is automatically formatted for future presentation on a web page, the Origen Release Notes are simply the Origen core history file converted to HTML.

When writing your release notes you can use markdown to control how they will be presented when they are later converted to HTML.

You can also pre-write your release notes by writing them to release_note.txt in the top level of your application directory - run origen rc tag -h for more details.

Once your application has been committed for the first time you can then use the origen rc command to work with your revision control system (or you can of course continue to use it directly if you prefer).

See origen rc -h for details of the available commands.