Skip to content

Getting Monocle running

Jump to bottom
Joseph Pearson edited this page Mar 19, 2014 · 3 revisions

There are four ways to explore the Monocle examples and tests.

Option 1

The very simplest way is to go here:

http://test.monoclejs.com/test

Of course, this way you can only test the particular version of Monocle that is live on the site. And you can't easily experiment by changing a line of code or two. Experimentation is the key to exploring Monocle!

Option 2

You can always grab the latest master of Monocle here:

http://test.monoclejs.com/dist/scripts/monocore.js
http://test.monoclejs.com/dist/styles/monocore.css

And the optional 'controls' extension is here:

http://test.monoclejs.com/dist/scripts/monoctrl.js
http://test.monoclejs.com/dist/styles/monoctrl.css

Please don't link to these files directly. That will just make your site slow and my site expensive. Instead, grab them and drop them in your own project.

Options 3 and 4 require Git!

So, the other ways require running Monocle locally, which means you need Git.* Clone the repository by running:

git clone git://github.com/joseph/Monocle.git monocle
cd monocle

Option 3

Create the distributable files. For this, you need Ruby, Rubygems and the Sprockets gem. If you have these, just run:

rake

And it will create the files for you.

You can now run the tests in your browser — just open the index.html in the test directory.

Be aware that this opens the files with the file:// protocol, which may cause security warnings in some browsers. The best way to run the Monocle is the fourth way, via Rack.

Option 4

If you have Ruby, Rubygems, Sprockets and Rack, run the following command from the Monocle directory:

rackup

Then access http://localhost:9292.

If you're handy with Apache or Nginx or Pow or similar, you could even set up a proxy to this Rack, so that you could access the tests on, say, http://monocle.dev .**

If you access the tests via Rack, you can make changes to Monocle src files — they will automatically update in the tests. This makes it the preferred approach for contributing to Monocle.

Notes

* Technically you don't need Git. You can also download a zip of the current source from https://github.com/joseph/Monocle/zipball/master.

** Here's what my Apache VirtualHost looks like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName monocle.dev

  DocumentRoot /Users/joseph/www/monocle

  <Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>

  ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:9292/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:9292/
</VirtualHost>
Clone this wiki locally