2. Prerequisites

Before diving into Orbit, ensure your system meets the following prerequisites:

2.1 System Requirements

The system requirements are a sub-set of the requirements for the pulse platform as both Orbit and Pulse have the same pre-requisites.

2.2 Software Dependencies

The software requirements below are a sub-set of the requirements for the pulse platform as both Orbit and Pulse have the same pre-requisites. Pulse and Orbit share the same technical stack in terms of database and language, except for Orbit requiring Composer to handle software dependencies.

• Composer Package Manager

2.3 Setup

Orbit interfaces with the Pulse MySQL database. In order to set up Orbit, you will first need to ensure Pulse is set up correctly. Once pulse is working, you are then able to install Orbit. It's worth noting that originally Orbit was developed as more of an interface into the Pulse data, but eventually became more tightly coupled with Pulse overtime. This guide will explain how to install Orbit into Pulse, since Pulse is a dependency of Orbit. However, there maybe conflicts between the Pulse documentation on how this is achieved due to the nature of how both platforms work together. There will be a need for a full understanding of the architecture and some critical thinking as this guide will not be able to guarantee a successful setup.

1. Orbit is Laravel, however, it's been modified to work within the Apache configuration of Pulse. Therefore, there are differences, for example how the environment variables are configured and loaded. There is an integration directory which superseeds the orbit directory within the pulse repository. The environment variables are configured here.
2. Once the environment variables are configured, you'll want to launch Orbit stand-alone by going into the orbit directory and running php artisan serve, however if you are running Orbit as part of the Pulse platform, you'll want the Apache configuration which can be found in the Pulse documentation category.

A more in-depth guide and explanation on this can be found here.