Installing ARCS.js

ARCS.js is in its early stage of development. Therefore, the software is delivered for a development setup.

To run ARCS.js, you will have to setup an environment with several dependencies:

• Node.js: command-line javascript engine and tools;
• Git: a distributed version control system required by some tools.

Node.js comes with a package manager that will help us to set up tools required to build ARCS.js and deploy it. Two tools will be needed:

• Grunt: a task runner that will automate building steps;
• Bower: a package manager intended to the client side, that is to say to the web browser.

We will install these tools using npm, the package manager installed with node and download all remaining node packages needed by typing these three lines (in any *NIX platform):

sudo npm install -g grunt-cli
sudo npm install -g bower
npm install

Under windows, you can just drop the sudo part of the commands.

Once this first step is completed, to setup the environment, two more actions will be needed:

1. Install web dependencies;
2. Build an operational version of ARCS.js.

This is performed using grunt:

grunt bower
grunt 

If everything happened free of errors, then ARCS.js should work out of the box. You can launch any example from the tests directory.