Installation

Newt is an experimental set of programs for rapid application development for libraries, archives and museums. It provides a data router, code generator and Mustache template engine. At this time you must install it from source code. The programs are likely broken, poorly documented and certainly contain bugs. It’s a prototype!

Install from source

Installation Requirements

• Go > 1.22
• Pandoc > 3 (to render Markdown content and some Go code)
• Git compatible tool for retrieving the GitHub repository of Newt
• GNU Make > 4
• GNU grep > 3
• GNU cut > 8

Building from source code

1. Make sure you have the required development software installed
2. Clone the Newt GitHub repository locally
3. Use the Go tool to build, test and run the application

step 1

The ./configure.sh script or .configure.bat for Windows performs this step.

./configure.sh

step 2

1. Start in your home directory
2. Clone Newt’s repository.
3. Change into the Newt directory

cd
git clone \
   https://github.com/caltechlibrary/newt \
   src/github.com/caltechlibrary/newt
cd src/github.com/caltechlibrary/newt

step 3

For these three tasks we’re going to use the Go command. It assumed you are still in the directory where you completed step 2.

1. Build the newt application
2. Test the newt application
3. If the tests are successful then you can install Newt tools

go build
go test
go install

Getting help

The Newt Project is an experiment!!. The source code for the project is supplied “as is”. Newt is most likely broken. At a stretch it could be considered a working prototype. You should not use it for production systems. However if you’d like to ask a question or have something you’d like to contribute please feel free to file a GitHub issue, see https://github.com/caltechlibrary/newt/issues. Just keep in mind it remains an experiment as of February 2024.