Build

Blockly Games needs to be built before it may be run. This is in contrast with Blockly which includes compiled binaries checked into the repository.

Get the Code

First, download the source code. Go to this project's home page to get a copy of the code using Git, Subversion, or a ZIP.

Get the Dependencies

Enter the Blockly Games directory you just created, and attempt to get and build the dependencies (Closure is the main one):

cd blockly-games/
make deps

If this works, great! But it will probably die with this error:

[javac] Compiling 375 source files to /home/fraser/blockly-games/closure-templates/build/classes
[javac] warning: [options] bootstrap class path not set in conjunction with -source 1.6

In this case you need to edit closure-templates/build.xml and change all four instances of "1.6" to "1.7". Here is the patch:

--- build.xml	(revision 28)
+++ build.xml	(working copy)
@@ -75,8 +75,8 @@
     <!-- Java compilation. -->
     <javac srcdir="${java.src.dir}:${build.genfiles.dir}"
            destdir="${build.classes.dir}"
-           source="1.6"
-           target="1.6"
+           source="1.7"
+           target="1.7"
            includeAntRuntime="true"
            debug="${includeDebugInfo}">
       <classpath refid="classpath.path" />
@@ -664,8 +664,8 @@
     <mkdir dir="${build.testclasses.dir}" />
     <javac srcdir="${java.tests.dir}"
            destdir="${build.testclasses.dir}"
-           source="1.6"
-           target="1.6"
+           source="1.7"
+           target="1.7"
            includeAntRuntime="false"
            debug="${includeDebugInfo}">
       <classpath refid="classpath.path" />

Rerun make deps, and everything should build properly.

Build English

The next step is to build all the English versions of the applications:

make en

Build all Languages

Optionally, you might wish to build all the languages, not just English. Be warned that this takes approximately 5 hours, so this may be something you should do overnight.

make languages

Build one Game

While developing a game, it is nice to be able to quickly recompile only the English version of a single game. Here are the build commands for the existing games:

make index-en
make puzzle-en
make maze-en
make bird-en
make turtle-en
make movie-en
make pond-docs-en
make pond-basic-en
make pond-advanced-en

The previously mentioned make en is just a shortcut for all the above commands.

Test Locally

Point a browser at blockly-games/appengine/index.html?lang=en and you should see all the games.

You may notice in the browser's console that there's a failed request for file:///common/storage.js on every game page. That's normal, storage is only available when run on App Engine.

Debug Mode

To avoid having to recompile after small changes, edit appengine/common/boot.js and change compressed.js to uncompressed.js near the end of that file. Now you can just press reload in the browser to get the latest version after most changes. Note that edits to the Closure Templates (*.soy) and changes to dependancies (goog.require) still require a recompile.

Do not use uncompressed.js for publicly-facing installations, since the browser needs to fetch hundreds of files and megabytes of data per page. That's not something you want to do over a public network.