hey, glad you could make it! this is a basic guide (with gifs) on how to install urbit and boot a comet. this guide howeever will also be going into some of my own qol tricks, but youll see a bit later.
okay so lets get started!
oh and also sorry about the extremely low quality of all my gifs. its 2 am and ive never done this kind of thing before, so bare with me
you will need:
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a computer (duh) running either linux or mac os. sorry bsd users but i dont think urbit currently supports your oses :(
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patience, because urbit is just one of those kind of things. even moreso on a comet
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a web browser, which oh look you have right now. how good
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a basic understanding of unix shell. you dont need to be at ghost in the shell gif levels of hackerman but it does help to have some background knowledge going in.
also this guide is 100% ethereum free! yes since we are using comets you do not need to touch eth! you still should consider a planet at some point, but that will likely make its way to you if you stick around ;)
ok so step 1 is obvious, fire up your browser and go to https://urbit.org, which is the official website of urbit (who wouldve guessed)
once you are there you should head on down to install + setup. thats the page that has all the material relevant to us. on there youll find the instructions for both linux and mac, im on linux so im gonna go ahead and copy these, its basically the same for mac anyways.
im going to copy the commands they have listed here...
and go ahead and paste those into my terminal
ok so that gives us the help command for the binary, lets run the command to generate a comet
./urbit -c comet
okay so now its mining us a comet, now this is an extremely long and painful process. this is the biggest patience test of them all, its not lying when it says it takes up to an hour. so id reccomend leaving this in the background and doing other stuff then checking back on it.
oh nice its done, but first remember one thing, ctrl-x switches between chat and dojo. lets just go ahead and run the +code command so that we can bring this into... dadada the star of the show!
LANDSCAPE
also its generally not a good idea to give out your +code like at all but since this is a comet thats behind a nat router i should be fine :^)
look at this beauty, anyways this is your home screen. not much to really do here besides look at the time and weather
lets go join a chat, im going to join ~dopzod/urbit-help as its one of the better introductory channels
ok so theres two ways to do this
through landscape:
and through cli with ;join ~dopzod/urbit-help in chat-cli
anyways lets send a message to make sure we're connected. im gonna go with an old urbit tradidion
perfection
okay so thats about it for the guide except wait, you forgot the most important part.
okay so updates, i consider them fairly major. they can make or break a product. and comets dont get them
unfortunately for mr ropdyl here comets can update. they just dont know it! but i know it, behold this ONE WEIRD TRICK to make your comets update on urbit.
okay are you ready? its |sync %base ~marzod %kids
one command, let me break it down
on urbit planets and comets route their traffic through stars, which are well, routers. stars also serve another purpose tough, serving updates. ~marzod is the sponsor for all comets currently so all comets will do peer discovery using ~marzod. what we are doing with this command is adding the crucial sync relationship that all other ships share with their sponsors.
basically we can now accept updates from ~marzod, and they do work! perfectly fine in fact!
i think this is a good note to end on.
and just remember friends, comet rights
rei (~sicbud-hathes)