Note that this repository is currently mainly intended to aid tool distribution to our users: although we don't currently expect much community participation, pull requests are gratefully received!

Forge aims to be as unobtrusive as possible as you're developing and testing your application.

This repository holds a number of command-line tools to work with your local Forge development environments, so that you can use whatever editor, build system and source control you want.

Run go.bat (on Windows) or source go.sh (on Mac and Linux) to install our dependencies and create a working environment for the build tools.

Run forge create to create a new app and set up your local development environment.

This command will create a user directory, with an initial app configuration file for you to customise.

This user directory is your app: it should be placed in version control and shared between team members.

Grab the user directory for your app from version control, or whatever method you're using to distribute source.

After creating a new app, or getting the source for an existing app, we can run forge build to create local runnable builds for your app:

forge build

You will now have a development directory, under which there are a number of directories - one for each platform you have enabled for your app.

You now have a user directory full of your source files, a configuration file which specifies how your app should be generated and run, and the development directory with runnable apps.

How to edit the source files is outside the scope of this document. Please see our other documentation we supplied for more information.

The generated add-ons in the development directory can be used directly in browsers. For more information, see:

• Loading unpacked extensions for Chrome
• Extension proxy files for Firefox
• Extension builder for Safari

After every change to your source code, you should run forge build to re-create the runnable apps, before refreshing / restarting the affected browsers and verifying your changes have taken effect.

We've made a number of optimisations so that most work you do which don't change your app configuration file will be very quick to build.

• example apps and tutorials
• links into API documentation