title: Installing Amber layout: default permalink: "installing.html" parent: Getting started
Amber is shipped both as
amber
with a small server, compiler and REPL;Using the command-line tool amber
is not required, as any webdav
server can serve amber files and allow packages to be committed, but
it is a very convenient way to get started. Also, the npm
package
comes with a command-line compiler and a REPL.
npm
is a package manager for nodejs, a
JavaScript runtime used to run JavaScript code outside of the web
browser.
nodejs
and npm
can either be
downloaded from the website, or
installed using Operating System specific package managers.
The easiest way to install nodejs
on MacOS X and Windows is to
download the installer from the
downloaded page.
For MacOS X users, nodejs can also be installed with homebrew:
brew install nodejs
Ubuntu provides nodejs as well as npm in its repository.
sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
Once nodejs and npm are installed, evaluate:
npm install -g amber
Ubuntu users will have to evaluate it with sudo
:
sudo npm install -g amber
The npm package doesn't provide the JavaScript files required to load Amber in a page. This is instead provided by the bower package.
Bower is a package manager for the web. It makes it easy to manage dependencies in your application including Amber. Unlike npm, Bower components are meant to be used inside the web browser.
We will see in the next section how to setup a project using bower.