Cloud9 on Cygwin with Node and Npm

If for one reason or another you haven't got a Linux box available and you're using Cygwin to run Node and such, then you probably want a good editor/debugger to go along with this and provide a tolerable experience comparable with that on a more native platform.

Cloud9 is pretty darned cool, and although the hosted version lacks stability with the git integration and various other things, the downloadable and hostable version is pretty much The Thing to use when dealing with large numbers of files in a fully fledged javascript client/server app.

At the moment however, if you want to use the latest node with the latest cloud9, there are a few issues, and getting this scenario working under Windows takes a tiny bit of manual effort.

• Install Cygwin.
• Install Git (using Cygwin setup)
• Install Curl (using Cygwin setup)
• Then run Cygwin.

That leaves us in a place to install the latest version of Node:

git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node
./configure
make && make install

If during the configuration step you're told that you're missing a component, run the Cygwin setup and install that component. Some of the names are a bit different, but googling suffices for everything here - you basically want openssl-dev and a c++ compiler - it didn't ask me for much more than that.

Next up, you want NPM, this is nice and easy

curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

When this has finished chugging, you should be sat in Cygwin wondering what to do next, and the answer is - install Cloud9!

npm install cloud9

Now, in an ideal world this would work (and in the future, if you're reading this in the future, hi!) it probably will work at this point - but at the moment you're going to have to re-build one of the components for cloud9 and copy that over to the correct location.

Pop into the Cygwin setup tool and install libxml2-devel

Then from Cygwin perform the following:

git clone https://github.com/ajaxorg/o3.git
cd o3
./tools/node_modules_build
cp build/default/o3.node /usr/local/lib/node/cloud9/support/jsdav/support/node-o3-xml/lib/o3-xml/

Now if you go to a folder with a pile of javascript files, you can run cloud9 by typing.

cloud9

The fruits of this labour should look something like this:

Now you can run/debug/manage all your writings inside your browser - ace stuff.

Credits go to a chap called Neil Kerkin who I stole this from and ported it into Cygwin so I could do JS if caught short offline on my windows laptop. (I've done likewise on my main Ubuntu machine).