Installing Swarm City Boardwalk

Hello World,
Recently I came across Swarm City - https://swarm.city

The idea of rolling up my sleeves and playing around with their MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the Swarm City Boardwalk (https://github.com/swarmcity/sc-boardwalk) seemed very interesting to me. Since the sc-boardwalk github page assumed Node.js, NPM, Bower and Polymer were already installed, here is my step by step guide to getting you set up to using boardwalk.

Current Specs

Using VirtualBox, I installed Debian 9 (Stretch) as guest release June 2017 - https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170617

After installing I ran the following to be sure everything was up to date
> sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Installing Node.js and NPM on Debian / Ubuntu

At first I was trying to clone different github locations, as well as compiling code from many sources. But that is not necessary, and also leads to much pain. The best thing to do is to always stick with package managers.

The 'required' Node.js repository for BoardWalk is not inherently within the Debian repository manager, so it needs to be updated. In addition, when you try and install, there are some old repositories that hang the process. That's why I have updated the repository first and then the removal of the unnecessary repositories.

> sudo apt-get-repository -y -r ppa:chris-lea/node.js
> sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chris-lea-node_js-*.list
> sudo apt-get update

Install Node.js 6.x - The Polymer FAQ states they only support 6.x and 7.x

> curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x -o nodesource_setup.sh
> sudo bash nodesource_setup.sh

Check Node.js is installed

> sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
> node -v # prints the version v0.6.11

With the installation of Node.js, NPM is installed by default. So now we are ready to install Polymer, and should have the minimum requirements to try out Boardwalk.

Install the Polymer-CLI

> sudo npm install -g polymer-cli

Install Bower

> sudo npm install -g bower

Install polyfills,

(https://www.webcomponents.org/polyfills)
> bower install --save webcomponents/webcomponentsjs

Now you are ready to follow the steps on the Boardwalk Git Page https://github.com/swarmcity/sc-boardwalk

> git clone https://github.com/swarmcity/sc-boardwalk.git
> cd sc-boardwalk
> npm install
> bower install
> polymer serve

Then in another window:

> firefox http://127.0.0.1:8081

You should now see the same image that I posted at the top of this article.

Have fun,
Foo