Getting Started

This documentation is for developers who wish to learn about the Lurch Web Platform, and consider installing it on their local machine to begin using it, either to build on it, or to help improve it.

Try the demos online

You can try out demo apps right now online, but doing development requires cloning and setting up this repository on your machine. Here's how.

Setting up a local repository

Install node.js, which governs our building and tesitng process. (The apps run in a browser.)

Then execute the commands below from a *nix prompt.

$ git clone https://github.com/nathancarter/weblurch
$ cd weblurch
$ git submodule init   # prepares git submodule folders
$ git submodule update # downloads all files in all git submodules
$ npm install          # installs required packages in ./node_modules
$ npm test             # builds app and runs unit test suite

Running a local web server

To use any of the demo apps on your own local machine, you need a web server (to avoid browser security concerns with file:/// URLs). You almost certainly have Python installed, so in the root of the project repository, do this.

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Point your browser to localhost:8000/app/index.html, or any other page in the repository's app/ folder.

CoffeeScript

To build the app without running the tests, you'll want to run the build command cake, which is part of CoffeeScript. Install CoffeeScript globally (just once) with this command.

$ npm install -g coffee-script

Now you have the cake command. Use it to build the app without running tests as follows.

$ cake app

See more options by running cake with no parameters.