I'm assuming you have basic knowledge of Vagrant. Install Vagrant, then run vagrant up to start the VM. If you're shared folders aren't mounting because there's a problem with your Guest Additions, run vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest. That should solve your problem.

If you want to connect to the database from the command line, you need to tell the MySQL client to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost.

mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 -u root -p

The password is root. Check out the username and password settings in .env, and specified in the Vagrantfile.

Copy and paste that command from inside the Vagrant box to connect to MySQL. Then run use alligrader to switch to the right database. If you want to see the tables that are created, run show tables;. Easy enough, right? If you fucked up something in your database and want a fresh start, run drop database alligrader; create database alligrader;.

There's also a command line tool goose for switching to the right migration. goose up will apply all migrations. goose down will unmigrations (or the last migration? I'm not sure. See the goose documentation for more info).

To dump the database contents out into a file, or make a barebones schema:

mysqldump --compatible=ansi --add-drop-database --skip-comments --add-drop-table --disable-keys --skip-set-charset --host=127.0.0.1 -u root --password=root shaman > mysqldump.sql

To run the tests, execute go test ./spec/.... The ... is a special syntax for recursively running tests.

To start the webserve, run go run main.go. To build the binary, run go build main.go.

To run the Dredd tests, run go build main.go and then run dredd. Before submitting a PR, your commit should pass both the dredd tests and the go test tests.