After several bouts of random installation issues, and several people asking for an easier way. Hammer is now available as a Virtual Machine. (and Mock Builder too!)
What does this mean for me?
First and foremost we are discontinuing support for the local installation method and its update mechanism. So we highly recommend that you install Hammer as a Virtual Machine at your earliest convenience.
Will this change my workflow?
No this installation method will not change your workflow. You will continue to work on your themes in the exact same way. The only thing that changes is how you start and stop hammer. These changes are documented in the README.md on the Hammer-VM Github repository.
If you use other preprocessor technologies such as Gulp to do live reloading, we have also confirmed that they will continue to work. If you have any issues beyond this, please make note in the issue tracker.
Will this work on my machine?
The installation has been tested to work on both Mac OSX, Linux and Windows. The only issue documented so far was a really slow OSX machine, and even it after a few kick starts installed just fine. If you run into any issues, again please let us know on the issue tracker and we will schedule a time to help.
It is also good to note here that the first time you load the VM it will run through an automated provisioning process installing all the software needed to the VM and will take longer on this first load. After the VM has been properly provisioned it will take a much shorter time to run any consecutive time.
What do I need to do to install the Virtual Machine?
Because the Virtual Machine by its very nature abstracts the system requirements from your machine to the "VM," the only software you need have installed and have at the latest versions of are: Virtual Box ,Vagrant , and a plugin for Vagrant called Vagrant Triggers. The links to this software can also be found in the README.md of the Hammer-VM project.
Can I uninstall the local install of Hammer?
Short answer yes.
The easiest method at this time is just to remove the /Hammer/ directory, and then modify your .bash_profile removing the hammer function if you are on Mac OSX, on Windows you will have to only the shortcut to the .batfile where ever you might have placed it.
Long answer yes, but with caveats.
First the Mac OSX install is different from a Windows install. Hammer locally installed has many dependencies of several different system libraries and components. In order to best abstract those dependencies on each machine, we were relying on a couple pieces of dependency management software such as RVM. Each of those components would then have to be individually uninstalled. However these components by themselves are not going to create any issues if you choose to leave them as is. You can choose or choose not to uninstall them.
You should also note at this point that you may be using RVM for other projects. We do at Digital Services. So before you move forward with any uninstall make sure you know what you are doing before you start uninstalling.
Mac OSX:
To uninstall RVM:
rvm implodeThen delete /hammer/ directory.
Then remove the hammer function from .bash_profile.
Windows:
Uninstall ruby via uninstall software in your control panel
Then delete the /hammer/ directory.
Then delete your shortcuts.
If you have any more questions or comments about the Hammer VM feel free to leave them on the issue tracker on the Github repository. We will respond to them as soon and as we can.