The demo included with AllenNLP is built using NPM so we can compile our assets and code before it ends up on the client's machine. This way, less data needs to flow over the wire, less computation needs to take place on the client's machine, and best practices can be enforced at compile time by automated tools.

Building and running the demo

First, make sure you have a relatively new version of npm installed on your system. If you are on a Mac, you can install npm with brew install node.

# npm -v
5.3.0

Next, you will need to install the dependencies specified in package.json. You only need to run this once, or whenever dependencies are updated. This will install your dependencies into the newly created node_modules subfolder.

npm install

Now you can build the application.

npm run build

Built assets are placed in the build subfolder, which the Sanic server is configured to use.

Now to run the demo, you can cd to the root AllenNLP directory and run the following.

python -m allennlp.run serve

You may need to force refresh your web browser.

If you are developing the Javascript, then you will want to run that portion through npm itself. This way the browser will refresh after each code change.

npm start