crybx comments on LW Open Source – Getting Started [warning: not up-to-date]

[crybx]

I use Windows and intend to try to get this running on my machine.

Also, fyi, the first link to the GitHub repo in the tl;dr doesn’t point to the right place.

[crybx]

I got further than gjm reported.

I needed to:

• Install Node (That link goes to the exact version listed in .nvmrc)

• Install Python 2.7.whatever since I only had Python 3 before this.

• Install Visual C++ 2015 Tools for Windows Desktop—This was the weirdest one, but after this, npm install works without error.

• Install meteor

I learned that npm start is unnecessary. It runs a bash script that

1. checks meteor is installed

2. creates the file settings.json if it doesn’t exist by copying from sample_settings.json

3. runs command meteor --settings settings.json

If you have meteor installed and create settings.json yourself, you can skip npm start and just run

meteor—settings settings.json

I verified that I was able to successfully build and run the VulcanJS starter example by doing:

• cd Vulcan-Starter code repo

• run npm install

• manually copy sample_settings.json to settings.json

• run meteor --settings settings.json

• I then had a website running at http://​localhost:3000/​

Additional info in the VulcanJS docs includes:

(A note for windows user: While running npm install you might get error regarding node-gyp and bcrypt package installation. This is because you need windows-build-tool for node-gyp installation which is required for bcrypt installation.)

This is what the C++ dev tools fixed. I don’t know if something like npm install -g windows-build-tool would have fixed this or not. I didn’t read this until afterwards.

Also:

Note that you can also start the app with:

meteor --settings sample_settings.json

All npm start does is run the above command, while also checking for the presence of settings.json first and creating it for you if missing.

But for LessWrong 2 I am stuck at an error that looks like https://​​pastebin.com/​​M1vqTMZd

I think I’m stumped for now. I can clearly get the Vulcan Starter project running, just not LessWrong 2.

[Raemon]

Ah, there’s actually a line missing from the sample-settings.json file, which I just added. If you git pull it should fix the “can’t construct client” issue.

[crybx]

Adding the missing line fixed it! I have Lesswrong2 running successfully on Windows at http://​localhost:3000/​ now.

[Raemon]

Huge thanks for all your debugging work!

It’s occurring to me we should probably have direct karma rewards for people who pitch in with the codebase. For now I just upvoted all your comments. :)

[crybx]

This might be a good use case for someone to create a Docker image (or some other container) that has a development environment that just works for new users.