Installation

Machine Dependencies

There are two types of installations that need to be performed in order for everything to work. There are the dependencies of the application itself, and there are dependencies that are needed to actually install the dependencies.

These only need to be installed once on the machine you're developing on, and it's finished for good. However, it can be tricky to do this initially, and the process for installation may vary depending on your operating system. It seems to be most difficult to install everything on Windows. On Linux / OSX, the process seems to be a bit easier, so if possible, use one of these platforms.

Here are the dependencies that you need to install:

• Git: This is used for version control, and downloading the application as well as it's bower/npm dependencies
• Node.js: This is used for the development environment, mostly grunt. It also installs npm, which will download app specific dependencies
• Ruby: Required for compass
• Compass: Compiles Sasss style files into CSS. This isn't needed to run, but the application will look wierd without it. On Windows in particular this can be challengin to install
• Grunt-Cli: This is installed with npm, but globally rather than locally. Install this with npm install -g grunt-cli or sudo npm install -g grunt-cli depending on your platform.
• Bower: This is also installed like grunt-cli, it allows you to run the bower command. Install with npm install -g bower or sudo npm install -g bower depending on your platform.

These all only need to be installed once, and then they will persist on that machine permanantly until they are uninstalled. It may be painful, but luckily you only have to do it it once, and the functionality that these provide more than make up for the tough installation process.

Application Dependencies

Now that you're computer can run everything, it's time to install the application, and get it to a running state

First clone the application onto your local machine with git:

git clone https://github.com/UW-itemMirror-apps/item-mirror-angular-demo.git

This creates a new folder with the application. You now need to go into this directory.

cd item-mirror-angular-dems

Now within this folder, you have need to install several dependencies from npm and bower.

npm install
bower install

Executing these commands will install dependencies for the application. If bower seems to hang and never end, you may have to enter your GitHub credentials. the reason is because you're downloading the ItemMirror library, which is private and therefor requires authentication.

After doing this, everything should be installed, and the application will run by executing the following:

grunt serve

If this fails, perhaps because of a missing dependency, see if you can't install it, but otherwise try grunt serve --force, which will ignore any erros or warnings. If you're missing a dependency.

If everything works, then a new tab will pop up in your browser with the application. Enable Pop Ups, and then press start. A dropbox popup will ask for authentication, and then finally, the application should be showing the contents of your dropbox folder in the left pane.

Grunt Issues

If grunt doesn't seem to work, here are some common issues that seem to be causing problems:

1. Grunt isn't installed: Execute grunt --version, and you should get the version number of grunt. If not, then grunt hasn't been installed or isn't in the execution path, on Windows, this can be a bigger issue. Try powershell if it doesn't seem to be working
2. Grunt is being executed from the wrong directory. Make sure that you're running grunt from within the item-mirror-angular-demo folder.
3. Grunt-cli is installed, but /grunt/ isn't! When you run grunt --version, you should get two package versions, not one. One for grunt, and one for grunt-cli. If this isn't the case, then execute npm install grunt