All the code for this book can be accessed from GitHub (https://github.com/). GitHub is an online Git-based repository that you can use to store, access, and version source code. There are a couple of ways you can get the sources for yourself:
Clone the Git-based repository
Download and extract the archive
In the following sections, we'll explore these options in more detail.
Git is an open source distributed Version Control System that I have used to create and version all the examples in this book. For this I've used GitHub, a free, online Git-based repository. You can browse this repository by following this link: https://github.com/josdirksen/learning-threejs
To get all the examples you can clone this repository using the git command line tool. To do this, you first need to download a Git client for your operating system. For most modern operating systems, a client can be downloaded from http://git-scm.com or you can use the one provided by GitHub itself (for Mac and Windows). After installing Git, you can use this to get a clone of this book's repository. Open a command prompt and go to the directory where you want to download the sources. In that directory, run the following command:
git clone https://github.com/josdirksen/learning-threejs
This will start downloading all the examples as shown in the following screenshot:
The directory learning-three.js will now contain all the examples that are used throughout this book.
If you don't want to use Git to download the sources directly from GitHub, you can also download an archive. Go to the URL https://github.com/josdirksen/learning-threejs and click on the download link as shown in the following screenshot:
Extract this to a directory of your choice, and you'll have all the examples available.
Now that you've downloaded or cloned the source code, let's do a quick check to see if everything is working and make you familiar with the directory structure. The code and examples are organized per chapter. There are two different ways of viewing the examples. You can either open the extracted or cloned directory in a browser directly and run a specific example, or you can install a local web server. The first approach will work for most of the basic examples, but when we start loading external resources such as models or texture images, just opening the HTML file isn't enough. In this case we need a local web server to make sure that the external resources are loaded correctly. In the following section, we will discuss a couple of different ways you can set up a simple local web server for testing.
Setting up a local web server is very easy, depending on what you've already got installed. We will list a couple of examples on how to do this.
Most Unix/Linux/Mac systems already have Python installed in them. On those systems you can very easily start a local web server:
> python -m SimpleHTTPServer Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...
Do this in the directory where you have checked out/downloaded the source code.
If you've already done some work with Node.js, there is a good chance that you've got NPM installed. With NPM you've got two simple options to set up a quick local web server for testing. The first one uses the HTTP Server module:
> npm install -g http-server > http-server Starting up http-server, serving ./ on port: 8080 Hit CTRL-C to stop the server
Alternatively you can also use the Simple HTTP Server option:
> npm install -g simple-http-server > nserver simple-http-server Now Serving: /Users/jos/git/Physijs at http://localhost:8000/
A disadvantage of this second approach, however, is that it doesn't automatically show the directory listings, whereas the first approach does.
If you haven't got Python or NPM installed, there is a simple, portable web server, named Mongoose, that you can use. First download the binaries for your specific platform from the following URL: https://code.google.com/p/mongoose/downloads/list. On the Windows platform, copy the downloaded file to the directory containing the examples and double-click on it to start a web browser showing the contents of the directory it is started in.
For other operating systems, you must also copy the executable to the target directory, but instead of double-clicking on the executable you have to launch it from the command line. In both cases, a local web server will be started on port 8080.
By just clicking on a chapter, we can show and access all the examples for that chapter. If I discuss an example in this book, I'll refer to the specific name and folder so that you can directly test and play around with the code.
At this point you should have an editor installed and have access to all the sources. Now it is time to start creating our first Three.js scene.