DEVELOPING FOR MAFIA IN JS

Hey all. This is a brief explainer on how to get to a usable JS development environment for KOLMafia. Ideally, this will cover everything you need to make a sample JavaScript mafia script. This was written by a JS novice, so hopefully it properly enumerates everything you need to do to get an environment up and running!

• STEP 1: Download Node.js / NPM. This will allow you to install babel/webpack and set up a compiler. To download, visit the latest node.js build. Then install the package manager, yarn, by opening a terminal and typing: npm install -g yarn. Think of this like immediately installing Chrome or Firefox on a new computer instead of using Internet Explorer.
• STEP 2: Let's set up a sample repository. You can do that using this starter repository right here! I would recommend starting by forking the repository, which you can do up in the top right of the page using the "fork" button. Once you have forked this repository, clone it to your machine by going back to your terminal (navigating to the directory where you want to store your github repos) and typing git clone & the .git URL that is accessible via the green 'CODE' button above the file tree in the GitHub page you'll see before you. NOTE: if this command does not work, you probably do not have Git installed on your computer, and will also need to install Git. Please find information on how to do that here.
• STEP 3: You should now have a copy of this repository on your machine, with a package.json file you can use to help ensure your dependencies are installed. Let's switch to VSCode now to start working with it. Open the VSCode and open the folder containing your repo. You can also open a terminal within VSCode to save clicks by pressing `ctrl+shift+``.
• STEP 4: Run yarn install while inside your new directory to ensure your local copy of npm has correctly installed necessary dependencies, like the Loathing Scripting Society's JS toolkit (LIBRAM) & other KoLMafia JS toolkits.
• STEP 5: Let's modify the code a little bit. At build, all this code does is tell you how much MP you have relative to the number 200; let's change the print statement to add your name in here. Modify "main.ts" to include the following, changing "[NAME]" to your name.:

import { myMp, print } from "kolmafia";

export function checkMP() {
  if (myMp() < 200) {
    return "Your MP is less than 200, buddy.";
  } else {
    return "Your MP is greater than or equal to 200. Congratulations, [NAME]";
  }
}

export function main() {
  print(checkMP());
}

• STEP 6: Now, let's update package.json; run yarn init to revamp the package.json file to reflect whatever you want your script to be named. The new name will propagate down into the final build.
• STEP 7: Let's build your code! Run yarn run build to build out a new output main.js file.
• STEP 8: (OPTIONAL) Now, you want to symlink your code into your KoLMafia directory. This will involve using a linking command. Keep in mind that you cannot do ./ completion with symlinks; you need to explicitly list out the entire file path. My symlink command on Mac OS was the following: ln -s "$PWD/KoLmafia/scripts/PACKAGE_NAME ~/Library/Application\ Support/KoLmafia/scripts/ -- Windows and Linux users may need a different approach. You can also simply move the generated JS script into your mafia/scripts folder, you'll just need to remember when debugging to do it every time you re-compile the script.
• STEP 9: From the KoLMafia GCLI, run "main.js" -- this should generate your MP statement. Congrats, you made something!

For extra credit, you can install some very helpful VS Code extensions: ESLint and Prettier. If you install the latter, your code will auto-format on save!