Haxe Bootstrapper

This Ant-based bootstrapper allows you to set up an up-to-date, bleeding edge Haxe and Neko development environment on your computer, by executing a single, dependency-less script. The tool will download the latest nightly-build of Haxe, as well as the latest release of the Neko VM, and set those up inside the directory where the bootstrapper lies.

Your user environment will also be properly configured, creating the necessary variables and enabling system-wide access to Haxe and Neko.

It will also configure the directory that haxelib (the library management tool that comes with Haxe) uses to store your libraries, allowing you to easily upgrade your Haxe installation by simply re-running the script.

Which platforms are supported?

The script is designed to work on Windows and Mac OS X.

It was tested on the following platforms:

• Windows 7
• MacOS X 10.6
• MacOS X 10.7 (uses 10.6 builds)

How to make it work?

You need Apache Ant to run the script. This tool can be freely downloaded, or installed automatically by some OS (sudo apt-get install ant). The full installation guide is provided by Apache here. Also, Ant relies on Java to run, which means you'll need Java runtimes as well.

Once you have Ant properly set-up, simply clone this repository where you want to install your Haxe environment, and run:

ant -f bootstrapper.xml

And that's it, you're done. You might need to start a new command-line prompt or terminal to access the Haxe and Neko binaries, because the environment variables defined by the script might not be propagated to the terminal you used to run the script itself.

On MacOS X, you might be prompted for a password. This is your sudo password, and it is asked so the Bootstrapper can create symbolic links of Haxe in your /usr/bin directory.

I'm behind a proxy, and it doesn't work!

You can configure your proxy settings by making a copy of the local.properties.sample file, named local.properties. Just edit that file, fill proxy informations, and the bootstrapper shall connect through the proxy to download Haxe and Neko.

What happens exactly?

The bootstrapper does the following operations, in that order:

1. It will check that your operating system is supported.
2. It will download the latest nightly build of Haxe (as found in the official nightly builds page) and extract it in an haxe directory created where the script is being run.
3. It will set the HAXEPATH and HAXE_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables to point to that directory and to the std directory it contains, respectively, using setx on Windows, and launchctl setenv on MacOS X.
4. It will download the latest release of NekoVM (as found on the download page of NekoVM) and extract it in a neko directory created where the script is being run.
5. It will set the NEKOPATH environment variable to point to that directory, using the same tools as before.
6. On MacOS X, it will create a symbolic link on /etc/lib/libneko.dylib, pointing to the libneko.dylib file in the directory where Neko was uncompressed.
7. It will build haxelib and haxedoc from their sources, and copy the executables to the haxe directory.
8. It will configure haxelib to use a libs directory created at the same level as the haxe and neko directories to store the libraries you'll download.
9. It'll add all Haxe and Neko executables (namely haxe, haxelib, haxedoc, neko, nekoc, nekoml and nekotools) to your binaries environment. That is being done by appending %HAXEPATH%;%NEKOPATH% to your (user) PATH environment variable on Windows, and by creating symlinks for all those files in /usr/bin on MacOS X.