remoteStorage Starter Kit

This starter-kit is the quickest way to get started with remoteStorage app development. It gives you a local remoteStorage server and a Hello World app as your starting point.

In order to run it, you need node.js installed.

First, save this starter-kit into a folder on your computer, by downloading and unpacking https://github.com/remotestorage/starter-kit/archive/master.zip or by cloning this repository using git.

Then, open a command-line terminal, and type:

cd starter-kit
npm install

to install the dependencies (where starter-kit is the folder you unpacked from the download or with git).

This starter-kit contains three things, baked into one:

a remoteStorage server, which you can use as me@localhost:8001
a launch screen, which you can open at http://localhost:8002/
some sample app, in the apps/ folder (where the launch screen preloads from).

To launch all three, you only need to type one command:

node starter-kit

Next steps

Visit http://localhost:8002/ and click on one of the icons
Open the web console (Ctrl-Shift-K in FF, Ctrl-Shift-I in Chrome, F12 in IE)
There are now various server origins interacting:
- the API of your remoteStorage server is on http://localhost:8000/storage/me/
- the html page you used with the links to the apps runs on http://localhost:8002/
- the actual apps run on http://localhost:8003/, http://localhost:8004/, etc.
see how the AJAX requests go to the remoteStorage API on port 8000, which is different from the origin of the app you are viewing. It is a cross-origin AJAX request.
This is of course useless if it's on the same host, but you can see how this is a powerful architecture change if not only the port but also the domain name differs between the app and the storage: netizens can host their own data on their own server, instead of on the application provider's server. See https://unhosted.org/ and http://nobackend.org/ for more info about this revolution.
Inspect the application code in apps/hello-world/index.html using your favorite editor
Inspect the remoteStorage.notes code in apps/hello-world/notes.js
Read the docs on http://remotestorage.io/integrate/
Hack! :) Copy and rename the apps/hello-world/ folder to e.g. apps/my-first-unhosted-app/
The starter-kit will detect each folder you create under apps/ at startup, and add it to the launch screen on http://localhost:8002/ (make sure to restart node starter-kit each time you edit your app on disk).
Post your reactions and questions on http://community.remotestorage.io/category/getting-started
TIP: if you had trouble installing, this screencast may help.

Web authoring

The starter-kit also supports cloning apps from elsewhere, as long as those apps are hosted with CORS, and have an assets array in their manifest. At the bottom of the portal page, you will see a big blue "INSTALL NEW UNHOSTED WEB APPS" button. Currently, only the 'my favorite drinks' app is available there for cloning, as a demo, but you could add your own app in two ways:

by sending a pull request to https://github.com/unhosted/store/blob/master/defaultApps.json
by specifying a different app channel URL than the default https://apps.unhosted.org/defaultApps.json

Just make sure the manifest contains an 'assets' array, otherwise it will not be clonable. Since you have full control over your remoteStorage data, you can also edit apps after you cloned them. To see this in action, type:

remoteStorage.www.storeFile('8003', 'text/html', 'index.html',
    '<html><h2>editing my app!</h2></html>');

in the console while on the portal page, and then visit http://localhost:8003/ to see the result. Web authoring is a new optional feature of the remoteStorage spec, which we have been talking about for several years now (also in the context of Read-Write Web, and whose development was funded by NLNet. The new spec describing it (version 04) will come out in December 2014, and it has been added as an optional feature, meaning not all server implementations and storage providers may support it. Whether or not the currently connected account supports web authoring can be detected through remoteStorage.remote.properties, which is supported by remotestorage.js 0.11 and up.