Installing Profound.js onto an offline system

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Aug 16, 2023 by Jessica Tomkins
2 min read





Before you start!

Before starting the installation, please be sure to review the installation prerequisites.

This guide will teach you how to install Profound.js on to an IBM i which is disconnected from the Internet. For this:

  • You will need a system (Win10, Mac, Linux), on the same network as the IBM i, which is connected to the Internet - this could be your local machine.

  • That same system will need Node.js+NPM installed. Download those here. 

  • The IBM i you're working with will need Node.js and NPM installed. Please see Installing Prerequisites..

  • Profound UI will need to be installed. The Profound.js installer will prompt the user for their htdocs directory. If the directory provided does not exist, the installation will hang as it tries to connect to the internet to download a copy.

Written Instructions

Setting up the Proxy

On your local machine, you will need to install Sinopia via NPM. Sinopia can be used as a local NPM cache, a proxy for the NPM registry or even a private registry. In this case, it is used as a proxy.

  1. To install Sinopia, use npm install -g sinopia.

  2. To launch Sinopia, use sinopia. This will create the default config file.


Shell
C:\Users\profoundlogic> sinopia warn --- config file - C:\Users\profoundlogic\AppData\Roaming\sinopia\config.yaml warn --- http address - http://0.0.0.0:4873/

So Sinopia can be accessed from the local network, you need to add the following text to the config.yaml that Sinopia generated.

listen: - 0.0.0.0:4873

After the config.yaml change, you should restart Sinopia. For the next steps, you will need to know the local system's internal IP address or hostname so your IBM i can connect to it.

Connecting to the Proxy and installing

On your IBM i, before you continue to install Profound.js, you must change the registry which NPM will use.

  1. From SSH (or QP2TERM) you should use npm set registry <URL>, where <URL> is 'http://localmachine:4873' (without quote marks) and where localmachine is the internal IP or hostname of the system running Sinopia)

  2. After changing the registry, you should continue with Installing/Upgrading Profound.js as the 'npm install profoundjs' will now point at the proxy for all the dependencies.

  3. After the installation, you should reset the registry by using 'npm set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/'