How to make changes to "core" and test them?

[eddy]

Apologies in advance for this newb first post but I feel a bit lost in this FreeBSD world...

I've successfully installed a FreeBSD-12.1 VM and followed the Setting up a build system steps. That all went fine.

Then I found a post in the forums that said to run something like:

make prefetch-packages,base,kernel VERSION=20.7.1

which also seemed to work.

Next I ran:

cd /usr/core
git checkout -b my-new-branch

and made a simple change (just as a test), added and committed it, but now I don't know what's next.

I saw something about needing to set COREBRANCH=my-new-branch?

So my questions:

• How do I rebuild core so it picks up my change(s) (ideally without having to rebuild anything else)?
• Once there's a new core, how do I go about testing the changes? Do I need to keep re-installing OPNsense from an image, or is there a more efficient way? (The files I'm changing are just .php and .inc files, in case that makes things easier?)

Thanks for any help.

[mimugmail]

What exactly do you want to achieve? You can also edit on live system in /usr/local/opnsense or /usr/local/www.

If you want to build a dvd Just follow tools repo .. do changes to /use/core and make dvd in /usr/tools

[eddy]

My end-goal is to add a bit of new functionality and open a Pull Request. I believe all of my changes are restricted to the core repo.

I thought about "working on a live system", but figured it might be good to follow the "setting up a build system" steps, but as you can see, I didn't get very far.

Is "making a dvd" and then installing from that the only other way?

[mimugmail]

On a test OPN VM:

opnsense-code core
cd /usr/core

Do your changes there, then

make upgrade

[eddy]

Ah, thanks!

This approach does seem easier. 

The only other thing I had to do was run:

opnsense-update -t opnsense-devel

before I could run make upgrade.

Thanks again!

[burns1230]

Hi, everyone.
I'm going to build "core".
Even after editing the php file, the modified contents are not reflected.
What should I do?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

If you need a ready-made development platform, you can use this:

https://github.com/punktDe/vagrant-opnsense

[franco]

> Even after editing the php file, the modified contents are not reflected.

You need to commit your changes for core.git in order to be picked up by tools.git