Prerequisites

On MacOS, you should be able to install most or all of these with homebrew. On Linux, refer to the package manager documentation for your distribution.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Most of this tutorial expects that you have at least a passing knowledge of Ruby on Rails and/or AngularJS. We will refer to basic constructs, conventions, and patterns of both frameworks. If you're unfamiliar with either tool, we recommend spending some time with the many excellent tutorials and documentation available elsewhere.

• Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial
• AngularJS Tutorial

When we refer to concepts without explaining them, this tutorial will always try to provide outside links and references. However, it's a work in progress

Prerequisite Software

Your system will need the following software installed in order to begin this tutorial.

Ruby

Your system must have a compatible Ruby installed. Xing should work on any system that can run Rails 4.2. However, at this time we have only tested it with Ruby 2.2.

In the application generation process, Xing will create .ruby-version files with a '2.2' specification. You may alter these to your liking.

npm

A current version of npm is required.

postgresql with HSTORE

By default, Xing projects use a PostgreSQL database as their primary data storage. However, Xing should be compatible with any database that can be used by Ruby on Rails.

Xing's default database migrations expect the HSTORE column type to be available, so you should make sure your distribution of postgresql has that extension available. How do to that is system-dependent. If you're on a mac and installed PostgreSQL with homebrew, it should already be there. If you're on Ubuntu, you'll need the postgresql-contrib package, installable with sudo apt-get install postgresql-contrib.

Redis

Xing will, by default, assume your app will be using Redis and Sidekiq for asynchronous and delayed job processing. To enable that, Redis >= 2.8 should be installed on your system. (Xing tools will check to confirm that it is installed). If you do not wish to use these tools you may need to modify config files in your application before running.

tmux (terminal multiplexer)

tmux is not strictly required, but is highly recommended. If present, the developer's console will be much more powerful for you. We'll discuss it a bit later.