silky / swish

SWI-Prolog for SHaring: a SWI-Prolog web IDE

SWISH: A web based SWI-Prolog environment

Installation

Get JavaScript requirements

Using bower

Install bower for your platform. On Ubuntu, this implies getting node and npm by installing two packages and next use npm to install bower:

sudo apt-get install npm nodejs-legacy
sudo npm install -g bower

Once you have bower, run the following from the toplevel of swish to get the dependencies:

bower install

Download as zip

As installing node and bower is not a pleasure on all operating systems, you can also download the dependencies as a single zip file from http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/swish/swish-bower-components.zip. Unpack the zip file, maintaining the directory structure, from the swish root directory to create the directory web/bower_components.

Last updated: Jun 28, 2015: Added D3.js and C3.js

Get the latest SWI-Prolog

Install the latest SWI-Prolog development version. As SWISH is very much in flux and depends on the recent SWI-Prolog pengines and sandboxing libraries, it is quite common that you need the nightly build (Windows) or build the system from the current git development repository swipl-devel.git.

Jul 5, 2015: SWI-Prolog 7.3.4 supports SWISH completely.

Running SWISH

With a sufficiently recent Prolog installed, start the system by opening run.pl either by running swipl run.pl (Unix) or opening run.pl from the Windows explorer.

Now direct your browser to http://localhost:3050/

If you want to know what the latest version looks like, go to http://swish.swi-prolog.org/

Running SWISH without sandbox limitations

By default, SWISH lets you only run safe commands. If you want to use SWISH for unrestricted development, load the authentication module:

?- [lib/authenticate].

Next, for first usage, you need to create a user. The authentication module defines swish_add_user/3, which updates or creates a file called passwd:

?- swish_add_user(guru, 'top secret', []).

If you now try to run a command in SWISH, it will prompt for a user and password. After authentication you can run any Prolog predicate.

NOTE Authentication uses plain HTTP basic authentication. Only use this on trusted networks and do not use a password that you use for other sensitive services. If you want to setup a public server this way you are strongly adviced to use HTTPS.

Design

Most of the application is realised using client-side JavaScript, which can be found in the directory web/js. The JavaScript files use RequireJS for dependency tracking and jQuery for structuring the JavaScript as jQuery plugins. The accompanying CSS is in web/css. More details about the organization of the JavaScript is in web/js/README.md

There are two overal pages. web/swish.html provides a static page and lib/page.pl provides a Prolog frontend to generate the overal page or parts thereof dynamically. The latter facilitates smoothless embedding in SWI-Prolog web applications.

Development and debugging

No building is needed to run the system from sources. For public installations you probably want to create the minified JavaScript and CSS files to reduce network traffic and startup time. You need some more tools for that:

% [sudo] npm install -g jsdoc
% [sudo] npm install -g requirejs
% [sudo] npm install -g clean-css

You also need GNU make installed as make and SWI-Prolog as swipl. With all that in place, the following command creates the minified versions:

% make

The default main page (/) is generated from lib/page.pl. It uses minified JavaScript and CSS from web/js/swish-min.js web/css/swish-min.css when available. If the minified files are not present, the server automatically includes the full source. The generated files may be removed using

make clean

Alternatively, use of the minified files can be disable from Prolog using this command and reloading the page:

?- debug(nominified).

Documentation

The JavaScript is documented using JsDoc. The generated documentation is available in web/js/doc/index.html.