Quick start guide

There are individual "How To" guides for the scanner, layout and explorer but I thought it'd be useful to have a single "quick start" guide for people who just want to run something and have a play. This uses the defaults for everything - look at the detailed guides for more.

1. Check out your code

The first step is to have a clean check-out of your code. The scanner assumes the code is all in a single subdirectory, or in per-project directories as children of that directory. Note you can specify that it should follow symbolic links if you want.

2. Get the tools

The Scanner

You should be able to fetch a binary release for x86 Mac, Windows or Linux from https://github.com/kornysietsma/polyglot-code-scanner/releases

You need to follow extra steps here to get the binary working on a Mac.

The Layout tool

You should be able to fetch a binary release for x86 Mac, Windows or Linux from https://github.com/kornysietsma/polyglot-code-offline-layout/releases

You need to follow extra steps here to get the binary working on a Mac.

Or you can follow the steps here to run the layout tool from source - you'll need a working node.js environment.

The Explorer

The Explorer is not an executable file - it's a zip file containing the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files needed to run the site. You can run it yourself by:

• Downloading the polyglot-code-explorer file from the latest release at https://github.com/kornysietsma/polyglot-code-explorer/releases
• Unzip it somewhere
• Load the site in a static web server - see here for an example.

At a later stage you can copy your project's data file into the unzipped explorer code to view your own data.

3. Scan your code to produce a JSON file

This is a two-step process - the scanner produces a basic JSON file, the layout tool adds layout information to produce a new JSON file:

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polyglot_code_scanner --name my_project ~/projects/my_project -o my_project_1.json
polyglot-code-offline-layout -i my_project_1.json -o my_project.json

4. Copy the JSON file into the explorer over the default file

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cp my_project.json ~/explorer/public/data/default.json

5. Run the explorer as a static site, view it in a browser

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$ cd ~/explorer
$ python3 -m http.server
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/)

then browse to http://0.0.0.0:8000 to start exploring!