the-via / app

GNU General Public License v3.0
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Instructions in readme insufficient to build or run project #159

Open alphapapa opened 1 year ago

alphapapa commented 1 year ago

Hello,

The instructions in the readme say to run npm run start or npm run build. After checking out the git repo and running those commands, errors are encountered because the dependencies have not yet been installed. So:

  1. The instructions should direct the user to run npm install first.

After doing that, the former commands proceed further, but they still fail because the keyboard definitions are not present, and there is no via-keyboards command which can be run by this repo's scripts. I've checked out the keyboards repo into a sibling directory, but it's not found by this repo's scripts, and there are no directions for how to integrate the keyboard definitions into this repo's build system. So:

  1. The instructions should explain how to include the keyboard definitions from https://github.com/the-via/keyboards into this repo's build process.

Lacking these instructions, it doesn't seem possible to build this project, and therefore it doesn't seem possible to use this app offline or from local files.

Thanks for your work on this project.

ilmagico commented 1 year ago

I also just tried to follow the instructions in the README and it just gives errors. While I am a developer, I'm not a web dev and so I'm not (yet?) familiar with npm to immediately know what to do. It would be nice to have instructions that can be followed and "just work" (or at least, have enough hints as to what to do when they don't).

Edit: Unlike @alphapapa above, I was able to just type npm install and it was able to start with no further action. Also, I see that package.json includes via-keyboards as a dependency, so I'd expect it to be automatically installed. Maybe something was preventing it from being installed when @alphapapa tried, and it was fixed?

Anyways, I'd suggest adding instructions to run npm install in the README.md.