OpenTripPlanner began in July 2009 as a collaboration between TriMet, OpenPlans, and a small group of third-party developers who were involved with various other projects related to open source multimodal trip planning. Since then, the project has grown to encompass a thriving, international community of users and developers. This page contains information for those looking to get started with the project either as an end user or a contributor.
Getting Started
If you’re completely new to OTP, the following resources are a good starting point:
- OTP Deployer — The easiest way to get started with OTP is by using OTP Deployer, an web-based utility provided by OpenPlans Transportation. Deployer allows users to simply provide their transit data in the standard GTFS formay, and the rest of the process — from gathering street network data to building the graph object to launching a live OTP web applcation — will be automated om Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. OTP Deployer can be used to simply build graphs remotely (free of charge) or launch and host a full OTP deployment (one-week “preview” hosting is free; long-term paid hosting can also be arranged)
- The Quick Start Guides — If you would like to get started with OTP on your own computer using pre-compiled binaries and data, the 2-minute Guide and 5-minute Guide on the OTP Wiki are good places to start.
Detailed Documentation
The OTP Wiki contains a wealth of additional materials for both users and developers:
- Advanced User Reference — OTP Deployer and the Quick Start guides allow you to quickly get started with OTP by using remotely hosted services and/or prepackaged data resources. More advanced users may want to build their own deployment from “scratch” — i.e. just the project code and their own raw data. The Getting Started in Maven tutorial provides an overview of how to build and deploy OTP using Maven and the command line.
- Detailed Developer Documentation — The wiki contains a number of detailed tutorials and other documentation for developers. Specific resources of interest to those just joining the project include the Installation Instructions (i.e. how to set up a development environment using an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans), the Developers Guide (project coding conventions and the like), the RESTful API documentation, and the OTP Javadocs.
Working with the Source Code
- The Code Repository — The source code for OTP is managed using the Git revision control management system, and is hosted on Github. If you are familiar with Git, you can quickly get started by cloning the repository by running “git clone git://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner.git”
- Maven and OTP — Build automation and dependency management are handled using Apache Maven. An OTP maven repository is hosted by OpenGeo at http://repo.opengeo.org/org/opentripplanner/
- Issue Tracking — Bug reports and feature request are handled through the GitHub issue tracker; anyone is able to submit new issues.
User & Developer Discussion
Several venues exist for ongoing user and developer communication:
- Mailing Lists — There are two mailing lists for the project hosted on Google Groups: OTP-Users and OTP-Developers.
- IRC Channel — You can chat live with other OTP users and developers at the #opentripplanner channel on the Freenode IRC network. You can connect using your favorite IRC client or chat through the web.
- Weekly Check-Ins — An informal IRC-based “check-in” is held most weeks for OTP developers to update one another on recent progress and discuss any major pressing issues. The chats are are held on the #opentripplanner IRC channel and are open to any interested parties. Please check the wiki for further information; note that chats are occasionally canceled or held via phone instead.
