Setting up a development environment

First time setup

If you don’t already have Node.js installed, install it on your system. The same goes for Git.

For Windows we recommend mysysgit and TortoiseGit. These will also get you the so-called “Git Bash” which is (almost) a Unix shell on your Windows system. It’s invoked by a right-click to bring up the context menu and then selecting “Git Bash” from that.

The development environment is managed with a CLI (Command Line Interface), buster-dev-tools. To bootstrap, you create a folder of your choice, e.g. busterDevEnv, to hold all the packages. Inside of that you clone buster-dev-tools from GitHub:

mkdir busterDevEnv
cd busterDevEnv
git clone https://github.com/busterjs/buster-dev-tools.git
npm install

Note: the name busterDevEnv is the only thing that you might want to change to your liking. Everything else can (and should be) copied&pasted as is.

Next, two environment variables need to be adjusted: NODE_PATH and PATH. The former, NODE_PATH, affects where Node.js is looking for packages, and we want it to do so in the development environment (busterDevEnv in this example).

On Linux and Mac OS X (or in Git Bash on Windows):

export NODE_PATH=`pwd`
export PATH=$NODE_PATH/buster-dev-tools/bin:$PATH
export PATH=$NODE_PATH/buster/bin:$PATH

Tip

Put the export statements into a shell script in the busterDevEnv directory, for example busterEnv.sh:

#!/bin/sh

export NODE_PATH=`pwd`
export PATH=$NODE_PATH/buster-dev-tools/bin:$PATH
export PATH=$NODE_PATH/buster/bin:$PATH
exec bash

Then make the shell script executable by chmod u+x busterEnv.sh. From now on you only have to open a terminal and execute the shell script in the busterDevEnv directory to make that terminal ready for work. You can omit the line exec bash, if you execute the script either with . busterEnv.sh or source busterEnv.sh.

On Windows (DOS-box):

SET NODE_PATH=%CD%
SET PATH=%NODE_PATH%\buster-dev-tools\bin;%PATH%

Tip

Put the SET statements into a batch file in the busterDevEnv directory, for example busterEnv.bat. Then you only need to execute it in a command shell in the busterDevEnv directory to make that command shell ready for work.

Finally you run the tool to get all the buster packages plus external dependencies:

buster-dev-tools pull

Refreshing all repositories

After some time you might want to update all the repos, including buster-dev-tools itself. To do so, simply repeat the pull command above.