Hydra is a lightweight vocabulary to create hypermedia-driven Web APIs. By specifying a number of commonly used concepts it renders the creation of generic API clients possible. The HydraConsole is such a generic API client in the form of a single-page web application.

For a high level description of how the HydraConsole works, please refer to my dissertation Third Generation Web APIs—Bridging the Gap between REST and Linked Data.

At the moment, the HydraConsole uses a JSON-LD Processor and a proxy written in PHP to access and process responses of Web APIs. Thus, the simplest way to install the HydraConsole is to use Composer.

If you don't have Composer yet, download it following the instructions on http://getcomposer.org/ or just run the following command:

curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Then, use Composer's create-project command to download the HydraConsole and install all it's dependencies:

php composer.phar create-project -s dev ml/hydra-console path/to/install

You can now serve the HydraConsole with PHP's built-in web server:

php -S localhost:8000 -t path/to/install

That's it. Just fire up your browser and point it to

http://localhost:8000

To participate in the development please file bugs and issues in the issue tracker or submit pull requests. If there's enough interest I'll create a dedicated mailing list in the future.

You can find more information about Hydra and a demo installation of the HydraConsole on my homepage: http://www.markus-lanthaler.com/hydra/