Narwhal Quick Start

Download Narwhal.

• download and extract the zip or tar archive, or
• git clone git://github.com/280north/narwhal.git

Put Narwhal on your PATH environment variable.

• export PATH=$PATH:~/narwhal/bin, or
• source narwhal/bin/activate

Run narwhal or js (they are equivalent).

• js narwhal/examples/hello

Look at the options for Narwhal.

• js --help

And for Tusk, the package manager and virtual environment tool.

• tusk help

My First Web Server

Create a project “hello-web”.

tusk init hello-web
cd hello-web

Enter your project as a “virtual environment” using activate or sea so that its libraries, binaries, and packages get automatically installed when you run Narwhal.

source bin/activate

or

bin/sea

Install some packages you will need, like Jack, the JSGI standard library for interoperable web services.

tusk install jack

Tusk gets downloaded and installed at “hello-web/packages/jack”.

Create your “jackconfig.js”. This is a trivial JSGI compatible application, wrapped in the ContentLength middleware to automatically set the “Content-Length” header.

exports.app = function(env) {
    var text = "Hello, Web!";
    return {
        status : 200,
        headers : { "Content-Type" : "text/plain", "Content-Length" : String(text.length) },
        body : [text]
    };
};

Run it!

jackup

jackup looks for a file called jackconfig.js in the current directory, or you can specify a path to a Jack application.

Open http://localhost:8080/ in your web browser.

Next, take a look at the introduction to modules, for a primer on using and making modules in Narwhal.