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™.