Configuration

The first step is to install and configure you computer with the necessary tools that you will need to create content.

In order to author you need four things in your computer;

Brew: This is a software package manager to install and manage tools.
Hugo: This is the static web generator that builds houdini guides.
Git: The version control system used to manage the book.
Git-LFS: The plugin in charge of handling large media.

CRITICAL

If you are not familiar with Git, it is better you do this before requesting to colaborate as it is fundamental for every single interaction with the book source. Visit Git Documenation first and get familiar with it please.

Install Brew on Mac OSX

We first need to install Brew which is a package manager and will allow you to configure your mac in a comfortable way, it is really cool actually.

> /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

For more information have a look at Brew

Install Hugo on Mac OSX

The Houdini Guides uses Hugo which is a static web page generator, a kind of clever conversion from markdown to html which renders websites that are very light and fast becuase they don’t use databases, only front-end stuff.

Please read this as well Installing Hugo information for all platforms.

For Mac OSX, use this…

> brew install hugo

Now you will be able to run hugo and test your posts, for information have a look at Hugo

Install Git on Mac OSX

If you have installed Xcode, you surely have Git already installed too, but in case you haven’t yet, Download Git and install it, here you have some important Git Videos to get your head around it.

For a quick starter, this Tutorial is an excellent begginer explantion of what Git is.

Now that you have installed successfully brew, hugo and git we can proceed to connecting with the book repository and start collaborating.

Install Git-LFS on Mac OSX

As you should know by now, Git is superb with non-binary data, but images and caches and alembic files are truly a major issue, for this reason the community has developed a plugin that works on top of Git in a transparent manner that has become almost the standard as GitHub and Altassian are behind it.

Welcome to Git-LFS which stands for Large File Storage and in a friendly way deals with binary objects.

Let’s install Git LFS and now you will have everything in your system to start building repositories with clever binary data management.

> brew install git-lfs

Simples!