Mobl develops rapidly. Especially the mobl standard library is expanding (and fixing bugs) quickly. As a mobl developer, how do you keep up? There are two ways:

  • Upgrade with new releases. Every release comes packed with the latest version of the standard library.
  • Live on the bleeding edge. By cloning the standard library using git.

Releases are frequent, but not as frequent as fixes to the standard library. Therefore, real mobl developers live on the bleeding edge ;) . Here’s how. Basic knowledge of how to use git is assumed.

Step 1: Clone the mobl-lib repo

The first step is to clone the mobl-lib repository from GitHub as follows:

git clone git://github.com/mobl/mobl-lib.git

This copies the sources of the entire mobl standard library into the mobl-lib/ directory. This does not only set you up with the very latest version, it is also…

  • a great way to explore what is available already. Just look through the sources to see what controls, functions etc. are available.
  • puts you on the fast track to contributing back to mobl. Add your own functionality to the mobl library, commit them to your personal fork and send us a fork request!

Step 2: Set the stdlib option in your config.mobl

If you didn’t have one already, create a config.mobl file for your project (this is a special file that is used to configure various aspects of your application). Use the stdlib option to override the default (plug-in) path of the standard library to use. For instance:

configuration
stdlib /Users/zef/git/mobl-lib

You should use an absolute path here and only Unix-style paths are supported. Windows users, your mobl-lib clone should be on the same drive as your project, if it is located on c:\git\mobl-lib, using stdlib /git/mobl-lib should work.

Step 3: Go!

That’s it. Your application will now use the git-cloned version of the standard library. Just in case you can remove your project’s www/ directory (a refresh may be required first), make a little change in your application’s main .mobl file and save it. This will trigger a complete recompile.

Step 4: Keeping up

To pull updates to the standard library, simply cd into the repository directory and:

git pull origin master

to pull in the latest updates.