Working with a local build

When working on local changes to Myst, it's likely that you'll also have a global installation around (either through brew install on a mac, or other means). This can get confusing when working with a local ./myst or ./bin/myst build, since the global myst binary will also be on the path and may get used instead.

A simple improvement to help clear up confusion (and to keep from having to remember the ./ all the time) is to make a symlink to ./bin/myst somewhere on your $PATH with a different name - something like myst-dev. All it takes is a single symlink line:

ln -s `pwd`/bin/myst /usr/local/bin/myst-dev

The target of the link (./bin/myst in the above line) is the binary with your local changes. The location of this file depends on how you built the binary. Using just crystal build src/myst.cr, the path will be ./myst (as long as you compiled from the root directory of the project), but using shards build will create the binary at ./bin/myst as shown above.

A good general workflow is to use crystal build src/myst.cr to test that the project compiles successfully and fix any errors, then use shards build to create a binary that will be symlinked. This way, myst-dev should always link to a successfully-built binary.