Installing Wren locally

Learn how to install Wren locally to solve Exercism's exercises on your own machine

This track relies on Wren Console throughout to provide a local runtime for Wren. This means that we assume all execution of Wren on your computer will happen using Wren Console. Please don't get this confused with the official Wren CLI. In a perfect world you could use that runtime but it currently has several different issues making it a less than optimal choice for learning Wren with Exercism.

Wren Console is forked from Wren CLI, resolves these issues, and adds features to make your learning experience smoother. Don't worry, the Wren language knowledge and concepts you'll be learning here should apply wherever you wish to use Wren in the future.

Install Overview

  • Install Git for the git command
  • Install Wren Console for the wrenc command

Install Git

You'll need the git binary installed and in your path. This is how Wren Package installs packages (such as the test suite you'll need for testing your exercises, etc).

  • Windows - The official Git download is a good place to start.
  • Linux - Your favorite package manager should help you out.
  • Mac - All recently versions of Mac OS bundle git right out of the box.

You can confirm Git is installed with git --version:

$ git --version
git version 2.31.1

Don't worry if the exact version isn't a match, this isn't typically that critical.

Install Wren Console

Windows

You'll most likely want to download the latest release from GitHub. After that you'll need to unzip, and copy the wrenc executable into your path.

It's also possible to build from source using Visual Studio.

Linux

You can download the latest release from GitHub or build from source.

wget -c https://github.com/joshgoebel/wren-console/releases/download/v0.3.1/wren-console-v0.3.1-linux.tar.gz
tar xzf wren-console-v0.3.1-linux.tar.gz

And make sure it's available in your PATH.

cp bin/wrenc /usr/local/bin/

Mac

The easiest installation is using Exercism's Homebrew tap and formula:

brew tap exercism/wren
brew install wren-console

Alternatively you can download the latest release from Github and install it manually as shown in the Linux instructions. Building from source is also pretty simple if you're familiar with such things.

Testing the Installation

After your believe you've got the binary installed propery, it's good to test if everything is working.

  1. Open up a terminal (Terminal, cmd, Powershell, bash, ...)
  2. Run wrenc -v

You should see both the wrenc and Wren versions listed:

wrenc v0.3.1 (wren v0.4.0)

Note: It is important you open a new terminal window. Any open terminal windows might not have been refreshed after the installation completed. This means that the open terminals don't know that a new program was installed.

Help: 'wrenc' is not recognised

You likely haven't placed wrenc in your PATH... On MacOS and Linux you can alter yur path by adding the following to either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zshrc:

export PATH=/path/to/your/wrenc/:$PATH

No idea if any of this is correct. On Windows open the start menu and search for "environment variables". You'll need to edit the PATH entry and add the path to the wrenc binaries here. Usually these are found at C:\Program Files\nodejs. If you browse here with your File Explorer, you should find node.exe, npm.bat and npx.bat.

Close any open terminals and open a new one.

Assignment Requirements

Please follow these instructions to download exercism CLI for your OS.

Once CLI is all setup & configured, download the first exercise - hello-world:

$ exercism download --exercise=hello-world --track=wren

Each assignment then needs some Wren packages to run the tests. These can be installed by running this command within the assignment directory:

$ wrenc package.wren install