Clone the Repository

The preferred way to work with Lingua Franca today is to use the developer setup. If you do not wish to use Eclipse, you can instead clone the git repository. This will enable you to get updates by simply pulling the latest version of the repo and to edit the code in whatever code development environment you prefer.

We recommend cloning the repository into a directory called git in your home directory. Make that directory if you don't already have it:

 cd ~
 mkdir git
 cd ~/git

Sadly, there two ways to clone a repo, using https or ssh, and many people are dogmatic about which they use. Using https:

 git clone --recursive https://github.com/lf-lang/lingua-franca.git

Or, using ssh (requires setting up your github account):

 git clone --recursive git@github.com:icyphy/lingua-franca.git

These will create a directory lingua-franca containing a copy of the repository.

The --recursive argument ensures that git submodules are also cloned. See Creating and Managing Submodules for more details. If you omit the --recursive argument, then some features, including the C++ and TypeScript targets, will not work. If you previously cloned the lingua-franca repository without --recursive or you need to update the repository with changes in the submodules, run from inside the lingua-franca repository:

git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive

For convenience, on the rest of this page, we assume that you have set an environment variable LF equal to the location of this lingua-franca repository. For example, you can do this in a bash shell as follows:

cd lingua-franca
export LF=$(pwd)

For me, I can check this using

echo $LF

which returns

/Users/eal/git/lingua-franca

You can now use the command line tools, which build themselves.