Enyo: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Setting Up a Development Environment

At some point, you’ll need to set up a copy of Enyo on your local computer or a server, if only to package up the applications you’ve developed. We’ll cover a few methods of setting up Enyo and discuss the prerequisites for each.

Prerequisites

Two basic tools are used by Enyo, which you may need to install: Node.js and Git. Let’s look at why they are needed and where to get them.

Node.js

Node.js is a platform for running JavaScript outside of a browser. It allows JavaScript to be used as a general purpose scripting language. Node is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Visit the Node.js download page to download the appropriate version of Node for your system.

To Node or Not To Node

There are several features of Enyo that rely upon Node.js. In Enyo, Node is used for minimizing Enyo source, packaging apps derived from Bootplate, and compiling Less files into CSS. It is also a requirement for the Enyo Yeoman generator. If you plan to release an Enyo app, you will need to install Node. If you just want to play around with Enyo and you don’t mind running the non-minimized, debug version of Enyo, you don’t need Node.

Git

Git is a distributed source-code management tool. It allows software developers to keep versioned copies of their source code. It is also the tool the Enyo team uses for Enyo development and the tool required to work with GitHub, an online source code repository that hosts the Enyo source.

Git is not required ...