Taaabs is a single page application using Polymer and running in a browser. Taaabs is written in HTML and JavaScript. Taaabs use gulp as Task-Runner/build tool, npm and bower for dependency management. Theses tools needs Node.js runtime environment.

node and npm should be installed with your distribution package manager (apt-get, yum, pacman…) if possible and if the version packaged for your distribution is the actual stable Node.js version. At least you need a node version >= 0.12.7 and npm version >= 2.14.1.

You can check theses version with node –version and npm –version.

If your distribution package manager cannot, no problem, you can download and install node (since v0.12, npm is packaged inside node, so you don't need to install it separatly) Download Node.js.

Assuming now you have node, npm properly installed.

We use npm for installing build tools and build dependencies.

git clone git@github.com:liris-tweak/taaabs.git cd taaabs/

Then, you need to install gulp, as an executable application. [sudo] npm install -g gulp will install gulp for you in /usr/lib/node_modules/ and the executable will be available as a link on /usr/bin.

Now you can try the command gulp in your terminal. If you see in the standard output something like “local gulp not found”, you have succefully installed gulp.

If you got a message like gulp: command not found, please read Installing npm packages globally and thisFixing npm permissions

The gulp working principle is to check the configuration file of a project and perform the tasks described there. This configuration file is named by convention 'gulpfile.js'. To run the task 'foo' described in the configuration, you write gulp foo.

Then, you can install bower, as an executable application. [sudo] npm install -g bower will install bower for you in the same way as explained before.

Now you can try the command bower in your terminal. If bower is installed correctly you can see a short manual about how to use bower. A thorough reading of this message is not necessary, but might be entertaining.

Then, you must fetch the build dependencies of the project: npm install -d. When you run this command, npm read the package.json file which contains developers dependencies. By default, theses dependencies are stored in the node_modules/ directory at the root of the project. The -d option in npm means that you want to install the dependencies declared as “devDependencies” in the package.json file.

Then, you must fetch the client-side dependencies of the project: bower install. bower will read the bower.json and by default theses dependencies are stored in the bower_components/ directory at the root of the project.