GEM Setup

The Setup¶

Testing GEM involves three fundamental steps:

Start the GEM siterunner server for a site.
Starting a GEM showrunner server for the show(s) you will be working with.
Running your show.

Before getting started, for your convenience, we have provided a Yaml file that will help you configure your test site and show. This will help you define shows, sites, and devices. Reviewing the sampleSiteDefinition.yaml and sampleShowDefinition.yaml is crucial, as you will need to edit them for your location and shows. This configuration only needs to be done once unless you need to make changes to devices or shows in the database.

Once your yaml files have been modified for your site and shows, you'll want to start the GEM server from the folder containing the GEM server in maintenance mode with a --dbmaint flag. This flag is only needed to delete and create your database.

Example:

gem-server siterunner --dbmaint

Once the server has started in maintenance mode, open a new terminal from the GEM server directory and run some gem admin commands to get your gem server in the right state.

If you've used this database before, run the delete command to ensure the database is deleted so we can start clean but this is not necessary for each GEM server update.

gem admin db delete

Now, we create the database.

gem admin db create

After creating a fresh database, or if you choose to continue without doing this step, you can now load the database with the information for the site and the shows you'd like to use. Before loading the information, stop the siterunner running with the --dbmaint flag and restart it without the flag.

gem-server siterunner

Now we will load the database. Start by loading your site.

gem admin db load ..\scripts\sampleSiteDefinition.yaml

If your changes appear correct, you can apply the changes with:

gem admin db load ..\scripts\sampleSiteDefinition.yaml --apply

The next definition we will load is the show definition. Repeat the steps above with the show definition.

gem admin db load ..\scripts\sampleShowDefinition.yaml

If your changes appear correct, you can apply the changes.

gem admin db load ..\scripts\sampleShowDefinition.yaml --apply

NOTE:
If you make any edits to the site or show definition (e.g., adding a new device or editing show details), stop the showrunner (the siterunner can continue to run) before you load the updated YAML files.

Loading the app (experience) Experiences should come with a manifest file specifically for the experience. To load the app information in the database, run:

gem admin db loadapp <pathToExperienceManifest>