Kaleidogen

Procedural art; check it out on http://kaleidogen.nomeata.de/

This also runs as a Telegram bot at https://t.me/InternetComputerBot.

Local development with GHC

If you want to hack on this, its easiest to use the nix setup (although you can also use plain cabal probably):

1. Install nix
2. Add the Kaleidogen nix cache at https://kaleidogen.cachix.org/
3. Enter the nix shell with nix-shell
4. Run cabal run kaleidogen to build and run Kaleidogen locally
5. Open http://127.0.0.1:3003/ in Chrome (Firefox doesn’t work well.)

For an even faster feedback loop, you can run ghcid to run the webserver and have it automatically restart when you change the code. You still have to ctrl-r the browser window. (See the .ghcid file).

Kaleidogen can build for various targets (Web, Android, SDL, Amazon lambda / Telegram), and so the kaleidogen.cabal file has many flags to enable or disable various components. The default is for building with jsaddle, i.e. for web or local development.

Building artefacts

The above builds a native Linux binary that runs Kaleidogen, and controls the browser using WebSocket, using jsaddle, which is good for local development. You can build this binary with

nix-build -A kaleidogen-local

it also builds the kaleidogen-sdl program.

The “real” version, though, runs purely in the browser, and is built using ghcjs. You can build that using

nix-build -A kaleidogen-web

and to get the actual source for https://kaleidogen.nomeata.de, use

nix-build -A gh-page

If the kaleidogen nix cache does not have the right packages, or you did not set it up correctly, this will build a lot of things (such as ghcjs).

The Telegram Bot runs on Amazon Lambda, and needs to be compiled statically. This, too, requires a warm cache or it will build a lot of things (such as a complete static environment):

# the binary
nix-build -A kaleidogen-lambda
# the lambda function zip file
nix-build -A function-zip
# Deploy locally (master branch deploys automatically)
aws lambda update-function-code --region us-east-2 --function-name kaleidogen --zip-file fileb://result/function.zip

There is an experimental Andorid build using reflex-platform, but it has not made it to the master branch yet, see branch android.

Building the SDL version

There is also an SDL version. To build and run:

• Run cabal new-run kaleidogen-sdl