We have customers all around the world.  Combine remote locations and the fun that can arise in some large hospital institutions with locked down networks and it can be a challenge to access the built in repositories we publish in Iguana.

You might see an error like “failed to send request: A connection with the server could not be established“.

Don’t panic!

We are just serving these repositories out of www.github.com/interfaceware.  The beauty of this is that you can use standard git command line tools and ‘clone’ these repositories to your local hard drive and access all these channels this way.

We recommend that you do this on a development system rather than on a production server.

Step 1 – Install GIT command line

Install a distribution on GIT. On some operating systems like Mac OS X and Linux you may be lucky and have GIT pre-installed. For Windows just Google install GIT for windows and get it installed on your machine. I will not document this here since the information may get out of date.

Once you have it installed you should be able to open a command line and do this:

git –version

and get the version of GIT you have installed.

Step 2 – Clone the repositories you want

For a complete list of all the repositories that are available go to this link:

https://github.com/interfaceware?tab=repositories

I would suggest making a directory on your local hard drive which your Iguana instance can read from. In there you can clone each local repository:

mkdir C:\gitlocal\
cd C:\gitlocal\
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-tutorials.git
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-tools.git
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-protocols.git
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-tools.git
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-excel.git
git clone https://github.com/interfaceware/iguana-file.git

Each git clone line is pulling down an entire copy of each of the above repositories and putting them into the local drive in the location C:\gitlocal\iguana-tutorials\ etc.

If you encounter errors with the git command line tools at least this will give more insight into locations network issues. You could follow this process on another network and then transfer the files into your work environment.

Now to import the channels in these local repos into Iguana you’ll need to add a repo entry for each one.  In your local instance of Iguana:

1. Go to Settings->Add/Remove Repositories.
2. Click on New Repository – the blue button at the bottom.
3. Fill out the screen something like this:

Make sure you get the path correct. Once you have done this you should be able to import channels from this repo, like so:

So of course of the drawbacks of this is that you don’t automatically get the latest and greatest code. But not to worry.  There is an easy solution for that.  Open up a command line prompt again and go to directory of the repo you would like to update. Then use the command “git pull”. This will go and get the changes from Github, i.e.:

cd C:\gitlocal\iguana-tutorials\
git pull

And one last tip. The repositories are constantly being tweaked and updated. If you want to be “in the know” and keep track of this then a great thing to do is to create yourself a free Github account and then go and register yourself as a watcher of the repositories you are interested in – see the circled “Watch” button?:

GIT and sites like Github are amazingly convenient in terms of making it easy to clone repositories which you can then own and alter. It be a great way to share and publicly demonstrate your skill and knowledge of the Iguana platform.

Enjoy!