My team has recently managed to get the WPIlib download unblocked on school computers. However, installing vendordeps is still blocked by the firewall. What do we need to tell our schools IT to unblock? I am confused by what the JSON file URL is actually pointing to. (we are using java)
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The vendordep is just a json file and is vendor-specific so the location for that file will depend on who maintains it (rev for revlib, etc).
The bigger question is what the vendordep tries to load and where from. Unfortunately thats also going to be vendor specific.
The good news is that many of the main ones (CTRE Phoenix, RevLib, etc) provide offline installers. This puts the vendordep json file as well as any library dependencies into a known folder on your machine so that it doesnt need to connect over the internet for anything.
But to answer your question more directly, “it depends”
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The sad reality is if your school IT has an overly-restrictive content policy, FIRST is going to be hard. Vendors have their websites (often blocked as “shopping”), GitHub (blocked for “hacking tools”), Maven Repos (on another random server), etc. And that’s all before you get to the mirad of FIRST-ancillary things like watching kickoff on Twitch, which I understand because of something about the last Twitchcon schools are locking down again.
It’s going to be a game of whack-a-mole (as it was for me when I was actively fighing it) and sometimes a personal device, a hotspot, and a USB stick are just the only ways to handle it.
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Something that might be helpful would be a FRC version of this,
At least for the core websites and tools.
That way teams could just send their IT department a document of what they need.
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Many are hosted on GitHub which is blocked on a lot of school networks
See if your school will allow certain users or certain computers to access those sites. They should have a log of blocked attempts and URL
Our school IT works with us (a little) and allows the mentors access to GitHub.
Other than that, use a WiFi hotspot or a VPN
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PathPlanner, Choreo, YAGSL and maple-sim are using github.
For other vendordeps (I’ll use ctre pheonix lib as example)
https://maven.ctr-electronics.com/release/com/ctre/phoenix6/latest/Phoenix6-frc2024-latest.json
Open this url in your browser, you’ll notice this block:
"mavenUrls": [
"https://maven.ctr-electronics.com/release/"
],
This is the place where the library is hosted, so unblock those.
Also, you can use VPN. In my country we need VPN to open google, so… I never turn it off
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