Version 5 and earlier

Installing Profound API is a matter of installing the profoundjs npm package. The tutorials and instructions below walk you through the process.

Video Tutorials

Written Instructions

The installation process is initiated from a command line. 

To begin, you must first create a directory in which you want to install Profound.js. You will use the mkdir command to do so. In the example below, a directory named profoundjs is created at the root of the file system.

The next step is to enter the directory (using the cd command) and run the Node Package Manager (npm) install process for Profound.js using the command "npm install profoundjs@5.8.9". This will download all package dependencies and install the product.

cd /
mkdir profoundjs
cd profoundjs
npm install profoundjs@5.8.9

The npm installation process will prompt you for details on how to set up the Profound.js installation. Default options are shown in parentheses after each prompt; so if the default is appropriate, you can just press Enter. The prompts are shown below:

• Specify Profound UI static files directory (/www/profoundui/htdocs):
  This provides the location of the Profound UI htdocs folder. If you have an existing installation on the same server you may specify that folder location to share the static resources or you may leave the value as the default ("htdocs"), and the Profound UI static files will automatically be downloaded into the default directory for you. 

• Specify port number for Profound.js server (8081):
  This specifies the port number Profound.js will run from.

 Warning Messages

Profound.js is provided as an npm package hosted on npmjs.com. When installing npm packages into a directory that does not have a package.json file to describe your project, npm produces several warning messages that look like this:

npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\Users\Alex\pjs_instance\package.json'
npm WARN pjs_instance No description
npm WARN pjs_instance No repository field.
npm WARN pjs_instance No README data
npm WARN pjs_instance No license field.

Some optional dependencies are platform specific. Depending on your platform you may see several warning messages like this

npm WARN optional SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: idb-connector@1.2.16 (node_modules\profoundjs\node_modules\idb-connector):
npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for idb-connector@1.2.16: wanted {"os":"os400,aix","arch":"any"} (current: {"os":"win32","arch":"x64"})

These warning messages do not mean that the installation failed. They simply mean you did not have a package.json file to descibe your project or are installing on a platform that does not require the listed dependency.

If a package.json is not found, the Profound.js installation will create a default package.json file in your installation directory for you. You can then maintain this file to keep track of your project's version, description, other npm dependencies, and more. For more information about the npm package.json file, click here.

 Troubleshooting the Installation

If there are any problems downloading or installing the 'profoundjs' package, NPM will print error messages on screen, You may need to scroll up to see them.