TWHL is a mapping and modding resource website for Half-Life 1 and related games.

• Visit twhl.info

TWHL4 uses the Laravel framework. Detailed instructions can be found in the Laravel docs, but here's the basic steps:

1. If you know how to use Docker, see the docker-for-development folder and skip many of the following steps.
2. Get an Apache environment with MySQL/MariaDB (5.5+) and PHP (8.4+)
   • The easiest way to do this is to download WampServer for your platform and follow the install instructions.
   • Put the php/php.exe executable path into your system's environment variables
   • Make sure you're using the right php version, OSX and some linux distros will ship with a different version.
3. Install Node JS for your platform
4. Install Git for your platform
   • If you're on Windows or OSX and aren't used to command line Git, you can install SourceTree which is pretty handy. There's other options too such as GitKraken, GitHub Desktop, etc.
5. Install Composer for your platform
6. Clone the twhl repo using Git
   • Make sure the repo folder has the correct read & execute permissions
7. In the repo's root folder, install the app dependencies using Composer by running: composer install
8. Add a virtual host to your Apache config, these instructions assume your repo is at C:\twhl, change the path for your system as required.
   • If you're using WampServer:
     • Go to http://localhost and click 'Add a virtual host'
     • Name = twhl
     • Path = C:/twhl/public
     • Select YES for PHP in FCGI mode and select PHP 8.4 as the version
       • You may need to follow the instructions on the page to set up FCGI mode
     • Click the 'Start the creation of the virtual host' button
     • This will create a host on your local machine at http://twhl/
   • If you want to use a different host name or port, or if you're using a different Apache setup, you can manually edit the httpd.conf file for your server. Here's an example that will host the site at http://localhost:82/:

     Listen 82
     
     <VirtualHost *:82>
         ServerName localhost
         DocumentRoot C:/twhl/public
         <Directory C:/twhl/public>
             Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
             AllowOverride All
             Require all granted
         </Directory>
     </VirtualHost>
     

9. Start up your web server and run Apache and MySQL (or MariaDB, whatever), and then get into PhpMyAdmin. Create a database called twhl with the collation utf8mb4_unicode_ci.
10. We're almost there. Find the .env.example file in the root folder, and copy it to a new file called simply .env. The default settings should be fine, but you can change them if you have a different setup for your DB server and so on.
    • After creating the .env file, you should run php artisan key:generate in order to create an encryption key.
11. At this point, http://twhl/ should give you the Laravel splash screen. If it doesn't, something's gone wrong. Otherwise, carry on...
12. In the git repo root folder, run:
    • php artisan migrate --seed
    • npm install
    • npm run development
13. Hopefully, you're done! Go to http://twhl/auth/login to log in. User: [email protected] // Pass: admin.

Some general notes if you're not used to Laravel/Composer:

• If composer.json (or composer.lock) changes, run composer install to get the latest library versions.
• Run composer self-update if it nags you, it's a good idea to stay up to date.
• When making changes to *.css, *.scss and *.js files, you need to run npm run development to bundle those changes into the compiled CSS and JS files. The easiest way to do this is to run npm run watch, which will watch the files for changes and auto-build when needed.