Installing flow on your system

There are three main options to getting a working install of flow on your system:

  • from source
  • downloading the latest release
  • using the install script

From Source

All pretty standard:

  • clone this repo (git clone https://github.com/andrewdavidmackenzie/flow)
  • install pre-requisites by running make config
  • build and test by running make

That will leave binaries (such as flowc and flowrcli etc) in target/debug, and flowstdlib installed into $HOME/.flow/lib.

You can run the binaries from the target folder (make sure it is in your $PATH) or you can install using

cargo install.

Downloading the latest release

From latest GitHub release download and manually install the executables for your target system:

  • flowc
  • flowrcli
  • flowrex
  • flowrgui

Then download the portable WASM flowstdlib and expand to the directory $HOME/.flow/lib/flowstdlib

Install script

Install the latest release using the following install script from the source repo:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrewdavidmackenzie/flow/master/install.sh | sh

That will:

  • install the binaries:
    • flowc
    • flowrcli
    • flowrex
    • flowrgui
  • install the portable flowstdlib WASM library into $HOME/.flow/lib
  • install the context definition of flowrcli flow runner into $HOME/.flow/runner
  • install the context definition of flowrgui flow runner into $HOME/.flow/runner

and leave things ready for running.

Test your install

You can test your install works by running an example flow directly from the web, without cloning the repo to get the examples:

flowc -r flowrcli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrewdavidmackenzie/flow/master/flowr/examples/fibonacci/root.toml

Which should download and run the fibonacci series example, which will produce a stream of numbers on standard output.