RippleAPI Quick Start Guide

This tutorial guides you through the basics of building a simple Ripple-connected application using Node.js and RippleAPI, a simple JavaScript API for accessing the Ripple Consensus Ledger.

Environment Setup

The first step to using RippleAPI successfully is setting up your development environment.

Install Node.js and npm

RippleAPI is built as an application for the Node.js runtime environment, so the first step is getting Node.js installed. Specifically, RippleAPI requires Node.js version 0.12, version 4.x, or higher.

This step depends on your operating system. We recommend the official instructions for installing Node.js using a package manager for your operating system. If the packages for Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) are separate (this includes Arch Linux, CentOS, Fedora, and RHEL), you should make sure to install both.

After you have installed Node.js, you can check whether it's installed by checking the version of the node binary from a commandline:

node --version

On some platforms, the binary is named nodejs instead:

nodejs --version

Use NPM to install RippleAPI and dependencies

RippleAPI uses the newest version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 6 (also known as ES2015). In order to use the new features of ECMAScript 6, RippleAPI depends on Babel-Node and its ES2015 presets. Fortunately you can use npm to install RippleAPI and these dependencies all at once.

1. Create a new directory for your project

For example, to create a folder called my_ripple_experiment:

mkdir my_ripple_experiment && cd my_ripple_experiment

Alternatively, you can create a repo on GitHub in order to share your work. After setting it up, clone the repo to your local machine and cd into that directory.

2. Create a new package.json file for your project.

Here's a good template:

{
  "name": "my_ripple_experiment",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "license": "UNLICENSED",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "ripple-lib": "*",
    "babel-cli": "^6.0.0",
    "babel-preset-es2015": "*"
  },
  "babel": {
    "presets": ["es2015"]
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "eslint": "*"
  }
}

This includes RippleAPI itself (ripple-lib), Babel (babel-cli), the ECMAScript 6 presets for Babel (babel-preset-es2015). It also has the optional add-on ESLint (eslint) for checking your code quality.

3. Use NPM to install the dependencies.

npm install

This automatically installs all the dependencies defined in the package.json into the local folder node_modules/. (We recommend not using npm -g to install the dependencies globally.)

The install process may take a while, and may end with a few warnings. The following warnings are benign, and do not indicate a real problem:

npm WARN optional Skipping failed optional dependency /chokidar/fsevents:
npm WARN notsup Not compatible with your operating system or architecture: fsevents@1.0.6
npm WARN ajv@1.4.10 requires a peer of ajv-i18n@0.1.x but none was installed.

4. (Optional) Tell Git to ignore the node_modules folder.

If you are using Git to manage your repository, it's considered a good practice to omit the node_modules folder from the Git repo. Other people who check out your code can use npm to install the dependencies, and you don't have to keep the repo synchronized with changes to other people's code. Edit the .gitignore file and add the following line to it:

/node_modules/

Save and commit the changes:

git add .gitignore
git commit -m "ignore node_modules"

First RippleAPI Script