Getting Started

Installing hackshell

Before you can run hackshell, you'll need to take care of four simple steps. Once hackshell becomes more stable, I'll offer pre-built bundles which will eliminate a couple steps.

1. Install Node.js v6.9 and NPM
2. Obtain the hackshell project files
3. Install hackshell's development dependencies
4. Build the hackshell bundles

1. Node & NPM

What are these?

If you're unfamiliar with these products, Node.js provides a standalone JavaScript environment (leveraging the V8 JavaScript engine used in the Google Chrome web-browser), enabling systems to execute JavaScript code. In the last several years, Node has become something of a sensation and today powers many popular servers, websites, and development tools, among other things.

NPM is a package manager (similar to those used to install software in linux distributions, such as apt-get in Ubuntu) for JavaScript. Typically packaged with Node, NPM enables developers to easily access a massive collection of JavaScript applications and modules, and create and distribute projects which depend on them without distributing all of the dependencies or requiring users to perform complicated configuration procedures.

Installation

I highly recommend installing Node and NPM by using a "Node version manager" - doing so allows you to run JavaScript software intended to be used with any version of of Node, and allows you to write your own code for the version of your choice. If you're using Windows, take a look at nvm-windows or nodist (my personal preference). For linux and Mac systems using the bash shell, nvm tends to be the go-to option.

After installing a Node version manager, use it to install Node 6.9:

• Using nodist, open up a CMD or Powershell console and run nodist + 6.9
• Using NVM, open up a bash console and run nvm install 6.9

2. Obtaining hackshell

In the future, hackshell will be listed in NPM, enabling you to simply execute something like

npm install --global hackshell

But for now, you'll either need to download the hackshell archive by clicking the green "Clone or download" button on the GitHub page and then extract it somewhere, or use git to clone it:

git clone https://github.com/KuroTsuto/hackshell.git

3. Development Dependencies

Open a console and navigate to wherever you put hackshell's project files, then execute

npm install --dev

This will grab all of the resources that are used to build hackshell and drop them into a node_modules directory in the project root.

4. Building Bundles

With a console in the hackshell root, execute

npm run build

and then

npm run build-cli

It will spit out some information about the build process (in all likelihood pointing out that some of my code doesn't look quite right per the standards that I've set), and then create a number of new files in a dist directory. And you're done - hackshell is ready to go!

If you'd like to know more about the build process (and why a project written in an interpreted language like JavaScript should even need a build process), check out the About the Build Process page.