RockLauncher
Provides a GUI interface that allows you to download any version of Rock from github, compile it and store it as a template. These templates can be deployed any number of times and launched to give you a "known good state" whenever you are testing code or functionality.
All data is stored in your User\AppData\Local\RockDevBooster directory.
Requires Visual Studio, and SQL Local DB (should be installed with VS).
This tab allows you to see all tagged versions on GitHub and import one as a new template. When you import a version, it is downloaded, built and then the RockWeb folder is compressed into a template file for deployment later. Each version only needs to be downloaded once as the template can be deployed multiple times.
You can now also build templates from GitHub branches as well as specific commits if you need to test a code change that has not been tagged for release yet.
Note: Each download is larger than 500MB, so expect it to take some time. Once the template has been built the on-disk size is closer to 80MB as a template.
This tab lets you see all templates you have imported. You may delete them or deploy them. A single template can be deployed multiple times, though you must give each instance a unique name.
Each instance represents a fully functional Rock install on disk. Currently you may only start one instance at a time, but a future version may provide the ability to run multiple instances concurrently. The Rock instance is configured to use a LocalDb database with the database file stored in the App_Data directory. This keeps each instance isolated from your normal SQL Server so you do not have to worry about polluting the database list.
Worry not, you can still use SQL Server Management Studio to connect to your Rock instance
database for troubleshooting and testing. To connect use the server name
(LocalDb)\RockDevBooster with Windows Authentication.
If you have done some configuration on an Instance and you wish to save it's state for later use, you can convert an instance back into a Template. Think of this as taking a snapshot that you can then rollback later and retest from the exact same configuration point.
Note: Because the SQL Database is stored in the instance's App_Data directory you can expect each instance size to be around 400MB on disk. A clean github template takes around 80MB on disk and a template created from an instance takes around 225MB.
- You may run into an error related to LocalDB saying to check the windows application log. If you get this error see this article: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15364542/what-does-the-datadirectory-registry-value-is-missing-in-the-localdb-instance.
- When deploying a new template, the page may load without any CSS. This is due to the fact that the page loads before the background theme compiler has finished. Wait a few seconds and reload the page.