Installation

Requirements

Pulsar can run standalone to allow you to develop user interfaces outside of the software, it requires a few things to be installed first. These instructions were written with OSX in mind, if you're trying to get Pulsar running locally on something else, we'd love to hear from you.

OSX comes with some stuff already installed, like Ruby, Git and Make, though you might need to accept an xCode license at some point during installation.

First Time Installation

Clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/jadu/pulsar.git

This will create a directory called pulsar, navigate to that directory.

cd pulsar

Pulsar requires extra software packages (dependencies) before it’ll work. Luckily, we thought we’d write you a little makefile to install these for you to help you get up and running quickly.

If you're on OSX, you'll need to install xCode from the App Store and then install the command line tools with xcode-select --install

When you’re ready, run the makefile:

make

This may take a while if it’s your first time, once that’s ready you should be ready to fire up the vagrant virtual machine with:

vagrant up

The first time you run this, vagrant will download a ‘box’ which is basically a lightweight Ubuntu build, it will then run a provisioning script which installs and configures Apache, PHP, MySQL and Git.

Once that’s complete, you will need to run the main grunt task which will build the main CSS and javascript files, and watch for any further changes. This can be started with:

grunt

The Pulsar Lexicon (a reference site containing lots of common elements) should then load automatically, or be available at http://localhost:3000

Day-to-Day Development

Once you’ve installed the Pulsar development environment to your machine you’ll only need to start the Vagrant machine and Grunt, you can do this together with the following command:

vagrant up; grunt;

Pulsar should then be available in your favourite browser at http://localhost:3000

Reinstalling

If something goes awry, you can reinstall the vagrant box with:

vagrant provision

You may also wish to try re-running make to make sure no dependencies were missed.

Uninstalling

Remove the vagrant machine with the rather spectacular command:

vagrant destroy

Then simply delete the pulsar directory from your machine.

We made the decision not to write any commands to uninstall the dependencies installed during the make process as we’ve made the assumption that if you’re using Pulsar you probably already have/need many of the same packages, and removing these would be a BadThing™.

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