Installing SrcBox
SrcBox differentiates between two levels of support: fully and partially supported platforms. Full support means that everything works out of the box. Partial support usually means that the tool itself works fully, but an installation or configuration step may require manual user intervention and is not fully automatic.
Fully supported platforms:
- Fedora
- Mac OS X
- Mint
- OpenSuSE 11.1+
- Ubuntu
- Windows XP SP2+
Partially supported platforms:
- Linux flavors (manual git installation is required)
- Windows before XP SP2 (requires manual configuration)
The following sections describe each installation step individually. Some of them are generic whilst others are operating system specific. In case of an OS specific step, it will be noted accordingly.
As a prerequisite, SrcBox requires you to have a valid Dropbox installation on your machine. If you haven’t already done so, in order to install Dropbox, you’ll need to first register an account for free at the Dropbox website. (Consider registering through my referral link as support for this project, you’ll also get an additional 250MB of storage space). After registration you can download and install their desktop client for various platforms.
Note, that this step is only needed once. If you already installed SrcBox into your Dropbox folder on one machine, Dropbox will synchronize it with all of your other machines, so you can jump to the next step.
Download the SrcBox package, which is a simple zip file available from the project’s github releases page. You need not worry about operating systems, since there is a single, cross-platform SrcBox bundle. After acquiring the distribution zip package, SrcBox should be extracted into your active Dropbox folder (the root itself is a good choice since SrcBox is already in its own folder). Make sure you’re happy with the location before proceeding.
To finish the installation in Linux, Mac OS and other flavors of *nix, the setup.sh shell script in the setup folder should be executed. $ cd /setup $ bash setup.sh SrcBox was successfully configured.
In order to finish installation under Windows, the SrcBox root folder containing the executable batch file should be added to the user’s path environmental variable.
For users of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and newer, Windows Vista and Windows 7, a setup script was also included in the bundle (\setup\setup.bat), which will configure the path automatically. Simply run this batch file and you’re ready to go.
At the moment, users of previous versions of Windows need to add SrcBox manually to their path variable through the Control Panel → System → Advanced → Environment Variables. The SrcBox root folder should be appended to the path. Please note that only newly started programs will use the modified path.
In order to verify that SrcBox was correctly installed and configured, switch to a random folder on your computer and execute “srcbox” (under *nix, do this from a shell).
At this point SrcBox will check whether there are valid git and mercurial installations on the local computer and offer to install them if needed. If all goes well, you should get a helpful error message that no SrcBox command was specified.
Should the srcbox script not be found, please go back and double check your paths and environmental variables.