Lux provides a set of primitives that make WebGL programming easier and cleaner.

Lux is under heavy development, so the current state of documentation is less than ideal. Still, I make a serious effort to keep all the Lux demos working, and you can see them live here.

If you cloned the Lux repo, you can find the demos in the demos/ directory. Because of AJAX security restrictions, you will probably want to run a local webserver instead of accessing the files through the file:// scheme (files in the file:/// scheme are considered all as being different domains, to prevent malicious scripts from trolling your hard drive). The easiest way to do this if you run any modern Unix is to chdir to the local Lux repository and run

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888

Then simply point your browser at http://localhost:8888/demos.

If you want to fix a bug on Lux or extend it somehow, you'll need node.js and npm. They're used to build Lux. On Ubuntu 11.04 and later, you can say

sudo apt-get install nodejs

to get node.js, but as far as I'm aware you're on your own to install npm. On OS X, I like homebrew:

brew install node
brew install npm

After you have installed node and npm, chdir to the base lux directory and type

npm install

You should now be able to use Lux's makefile to build lux.js, lux.min.js, and data.js.

The build infrastructure of Lux is completely based on Mike Bostock's excellent d3.