Skip to content
xs-dev

Setup

Moddable Platform Setup

This command downloads the Moddable developer tooling for the current OS (Windows support coming soon).

After installing the CLI, call the setup command:

xs-dev setup

This process mostly automates the instructions provided by Moddable’s “Getting Started” documentation with a few exceptions.

On macOS:

Homebrew is assumed to be installed.

XZ utils are required to install the CLI due to a dependency for decompressing the ARM toolchain used for nrf52 development. It can be installed with homebrew:

brew install xz

The Xcode Command Line tools are required; setup will check for their existence before continuing.

A symlink for xsbug.app is created in /Applications for easy access through Launchpad.

On Unix environments:

The moddable git repo is cloned into ~/.local/share instead of a new/existing ~/Projects directory.

Environment config:

This command will create (and update) an environment configuration file called ~/.local/share/xs-dev-export.sh (on Mac & Linux) or Moddable.bat (on Windows). This file will be placed in the shell setup file (.profile, .zshrc, .bashrc, etc on Mac & Linux) or the custom command prompt (on Windows), to set environment variables and call other “exports” files for embedded tooling.

Target Branch

The default behavior of this command for Moddable developer tooling pulls the latest release tooling and source code for the associated tagged branch. This provides a known-working state for the SDK and avoids needing to build the tooling on the local machine.

To override this behavior, use the --target-branch flag to select public; this fetches the latest commit off that main branch and runs the build to generate the associated tools. This can be set to any branch name, however public is the main public branch for the Moddable-OpenSource repo.

xs-dev setup --target-branch public

When combined with the --source-repo flag, it’s possible to get the SDK repo from another source instead of the default GitHub repo.

xs-dev setup --source-repo https://my-sdk.moddable-git.not-real --target-branch main

This will only work for the mac, windows, and linux device options, which are the respective defaults for the operating system on which the command is run.

Device Setup

While the setup command provides the Moddable SDK for the dev environment, the --device flag selects another platform target SDK to set up. It ensures the Moddable SDK has been installed first.

xs-dev setup --device esp32

Use the --list-devices flag to get a prompt for supported device tooling to install.

xs-dev setup --list-devices

There are some utilities that are not included in the Moddable SDK or other platform tooling but can be helpful with some common development tasks. The --tool flag allows for installing one of these related tools, which may not be easily done from a typical package manager.

Supported tools:

fontbm: BMFont compatible, cross-platform (Linux/macOS/Windows) command line bitmap font generator (FreeType2 based render)

xs-dev setup --tool fontbm

ejectfix: not a downloadable tool, rather a environment preference to disable the DISK NOT EJECTED PROPERLY notification while working with the nrf52 on MacOS. This will automate the process described by the Adafruit blog:

xs-dev setup --tool ejectfix