Desktop application for development and deployment Pond consists of the following runtime components:

• assets - images, JavaScript files, CSS files
• binary assets - this includes PHP binaries for Mac and Windows
• Electron runs the desktop client, top level of the execution
• Chromium browser - is run by Electron and represents the interactive layer of the application
• Node.js is a top-level runtime environment, it's ran by Chromium
• Vue.js and Vuex.js render the HTML and manage the application runtime data state
• Built-in PHP server runs Pond projects, which chose to use the built-in server, and also runs PHP Deployer when the application is in the runtime mode (for the development needs we use Target server dev environment for running the Deployer)
• Pouch DB used as a persistent data storage
• Pond Agent is a special October plugin that Pond installs to configure a local project.

Note: all commands should be ran in the root directory, which contains the app subdirectory.

Prerequisites: node.js of version at lest 8.x is required for running unit tests. I used the version 6.x successfully for the development, but had to upgrade to run mocha tests.

In the root Pond directory run:

• npm install

• npm run watch

This will be updating assets in app/dist in live mode. It could take ~15 seconds to load first, but subsequent updates take milliseconds.

After that, in another terminal tab, start Electron:

• npm run start

Find the PHP version specified in the file src/js/config/index.js in object path builtInServerInfo.darwin.php.version, for example 7.1.

• Download a PHP build matching the version here: https://php-osx.liip.ch/
• Run the installer
• Copy the directory from /usr/local/php.xxx to app/src/assets-bin-php/darwin (so that darwin contains bin, etc, lib and so on).
• Run npm run copy-bin-assets in the Pond's root directory.

Note: Following liip.ch's install will restart the Apache web server that ships with macOS. For those using MAMP, XAMPP, Docker or another web server on port 80, this may be confusing. Run sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl stop to stop Apache.

• Download a PHP build matching the version here: https://windows.php.net/
• Run the installer
• Copy the directory from /usr/local/php.xxx to app/src/assets-bin-php/win32 (so that darwin contains bin, etc, lib and so on).
• Run npm run copy-bin-assets in the Pond's root directory.