Inform Starter

So you want to be able to compile and run Inform from the command line?

I mean, obviously - this is for me, I am that person who wants to be like the cool kids and start using the Open sourced Inform.

This is what I've learned. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm doing. These instructions may be wrong. Don't use this in aviation industries.

I'm using Mac OS and fish (but using fish shell should not actually matter here).

Quick start

Once: set up inform compilers

Decide where you want to install inform. We call this INFORM_HOME (this is a name I made up, it has no special meaning to Inform itself, as far as I know). It can be in your documents, or wherever you like (but ideally not in Applications or some temporary folder). I use ~/Documents/private/inform10.

cd ~Documents/private
mkdir inform10
cd inform10
git clone https://github.com/ganelson/inweb.git
bash inweb/scripts/first.sh macos
git clone https://github.com/ganelson/intest.git
bash intest/scripts/first.sh
git clone https://github.com/ganelson/inform.git
cd inform/
bash scripts/first.sh

Alright. You could add those to your path, I guess, but what I settled on is actually just dropping in a Makefile in my project folder.

So here's how.

Starting a new project

Create a folder for your project, with another folder called Source in it, and your story.ni file in Source. And then copy in the Makefile from this project and put it next to the Source folder, so you have this:

myproject/Makefile
myproject/Source/story.ni

The most minimal story.ni file you can try this with is this:

There is a room.

Then cd to your project folder, and once create a uuid:

make uuid

And then whenever you want to compile, just go

make

If you want to play it straight in the terminal, you also need to brew install glulxe and then you just type make play. Another good way is to install Spatterlight - brew install spatterlight - and open the output blorb file. Once you've installed that, you should be able to just use open from the command line to open the blorb file in Spatterlight, which is exactly what the make open command does.

Adding extensions

What I have done is to clone i7/extensions - also in the INFORM_HOME folder, by the way.

You can add a parameter -external ${INFORM_HOME} to the inform7 line in the Makefile, but then it tries to compile all extensions. What I do instead is to just copy the extensions I use, including the folder with the author's name, to my project folder, and then import it in the story.ni file just like always.

Keeping inform updated

I am really not sure if this is the "right" way to do it, but it seems that it works to cd into your three cloned git repos and pull from master:

cd inweb
git pull
cd ../intest
git pull
cd ../inform
git pull
cd ..

Then start over with the bash build scripts

bash inweb/scripts/first.sh macos
bash intest/scripts/first.sh
cd inform/
bash scripts/first.sh