Set up

Three steps. Ten minutes, most of it waiting for a download.

star-burxt is written in Burxt, so Burxt is the one thing you install — the way you install PHP before Laravel, or Node before React. After that, star-burxt is a line in your project file.

1. Install Burxt

Follow burxt-lang.org/install. Then check it worked:

burxt --version

Burxt 1.3.0 or newer. Earlier releases refuse two things every component does — an update function returning a record that holds a list, and a pure function calling the JSON encoder — so a component will not compile against 1.2.0 or below. A released version is all you need; there is nothing to build from source.

2. Make a project

A project is a folder with a file called burxt.package in it:

name        my-app
version     0.1.0

dependency  star  https://github.com/andrecorugda/star-burxt  v0.1.0
dependency  bmx   https://github.com/andrecorugda/bmx         burxt-0.5.1

Then:

burxt fetch

That downloads both and writes burxt.lock. Keep burxt.lock — it is what makes your teammate’s build match yours.

Why two lines and not one. star-burxt uses BMX to read your documents, and a Burxt project names everything it uses, including what its own libraries use. If you forget the second line you will see this, and it is not a mistake in your code:

error: cannot read .../bmx/burxt/bmx.bx: No such file or directory

Add the line and it goes away.

burxt-0.5.1 is not a typo for the format’s version. BMX the format is at 0.2; that tag names the Burxt implementation of it, which is a separate thing released on its own schedule.

3. Build the generator

The generator turns a .bmx document into a component. You build it once:

git clone https://github.com/andrecorugda/star-burxt
burxt build star-burxt/examples/generate.bx -o star-generate

Now you have a star-generate command:

./star-generate counter.bmx counter

It prints the component it made. You are meant to read that output. Nothing is hidden in it, and watching your document turn into ordinary code is the quickest way to see what star-burxt does for you.

That’s it

Chapter 1: Your first component →

If something goes wrong

pure function view may not call html_element… — your Burxt is too old. Step 1.

cannot read .../bmx/burxt/bmx.bx — the second dependency line is missing. Step 2.

main is a name the language owns — a Burxt program is just statements, top to bottom. Delete the function main() { wrapper and un-indent what was inside it.