Initial setup and requirements

Rowboat has been tested on Windows 10 and Debian Linux. Debian-based distros and newer Windows versions should be able to run Rowboat with no trouble, as well as many other Linux distros. Certain optional features may not work on Windows; This documentation assumes you are on Linux, but things should be almost identical on both.

Installing Rowboat is fairly straightforward: Install the required software below, clone the repository, install dependencies and setup your instance.

You will need to preinstall git if you don't have it yet. On Linux, it's probably available as a native package too.

Next you should install node.js and npm if you don't have them yet. The minimum required version at time of writing is 18.16 (or check package.json). Rowboat makes use of modern Javascript features and can't run in older versions.

To clone the repository and install dependencies, open a command prompt in an existing folder and use:

git clone https://github.com/Protected/rowboat.git

cd rowboat

npm install

npm audit fix

npm audit fix will attempt to correct any issues with second degree dependencies (outside our control).

If everything goes well, you should be able to run Rowboat in the foreground:

node . --help

You're now ready to set up your config file.