Lurch requires no installation whatsoever if you want to use existing course content (such as the contexts or assignments from my example course). Instructors who would like to customize contexts and assignments to their own specific needs can also easily obtain a free copy of this website, and optionally install Lurch locally on their own computer.

Obtaining Your Own Lurch Site

Educators who want to customize their own copy of this site for use in their own courses can do that easily by forking this repository on GitHub.

Forking this site

1. Sign in to your account on Github (or create a free account).
2. Return to this page and go to github.com/kenmonks/lurch/fork (you can just click that link) and choose your account from the "Owner" dropdown. You can also optionally change the repository name. Then click "Create fork".
3. Go here https://github.com/your_account/your_sitename/settings/pages where your_account is your GitHub account name and your_sitename is the name you chose for your site in the previous step.
4. Tell it to deploy from a branch, and select the branch main with the default /(root) folder. Then click the Save button.
5. After a minute or so you should be able to access your site at
   https://your_account.github.io/your_sitename.

You can then replace the index.html file and other content with whatever you want to customize the site for use in your course by uploading your own.

Uploading and downloading files to and from your site

Users who are familiar with git already know how to do this. For everyone else, it is very easy to upload and download content via the GitHub web interface.

1. To upload or create a new file on your site, go here https://github.com/your_account/your_sitename where your_account is your GitHub account name and your_sitename is the name you chose for your site above.
2. Click on the Add File dropdown at the top of the file list and choose the desired option.

You will also be able to pull bug fixes and new features from my site in the future. Your students can click links on your site to open any Lurch files or other content you save in your repository just as they can on this site.

Installing Lurch on your own server

If you have your own web server and want to install Lurch on it, you can simply git clone or fork this repository (or one of your copies) to the appropriate folder on your server and you are in business. (Since you have your own server, you probably already know what that means.)

Installing Lurch on your computer

Lurch is a web app, and so it needs a web server running on your computer if you would like to install a copy of your Lurch repository locally for testing, experimenting, and creating new content before publishing it on your site. Users who are familiar with git can just git clone their GitHub repository created above to their local drive and point their local server to that folder. Most instructors will not want or need to do this. Developers already know how to do this. For the truly adventurous who want to give it a try, I have some basic instructions here.

Teaching with Lurch

Teaching with Lurch – If you’d like to use Lurch in your course, detailed instructions for creating, distributing, and grading assignments and contexts is available here.