Getting started as a commercial customer

This page walks you through your first steps as a commercial customer: signing in to your repository, installing the workspace, understanding its folders and taking updates.

What you get

You get every feature you see in the public demo at web.realvirtual.io/demo as source code. You can extend it and work on it with your own coding agents, for example Claude Code or Codex. What your licence covers in detail is described on Editions and Licensing the viewer.

Two kinds of access

You receive the source in one of two ways, depending on your agreement:

Standard: read access to the shared commercial source repository rv-commercial/realvirtual-commercial on git.realvirtual.io. It contains the commercial edition and no customer project. realvirtual publishes into it; you take updates with git pull and version your own work on your side.
Development customers: your own private organisation rv-<customer> with a project repository rv-project-<customer>. It holds your project together with the commercial components, and you have write access.

You receive an email with your organisation, your repository and your username. You set the password yourself:

Open git.realvirtual.io and click Forgot password?.
Enter your email address.
Follow the link you receive from git@realvirtual.io and choose your password.

Accounts are restricted: you only see your own repositories. Two-factor authentication is recommended. The onboarding email is sent automatically, so replies to it are not read.

Installation

Prerequisites

Node.js 22 LTS. The workspace does not run without it; the delivered version is pinned in .nvmrc. After installing, open a new terminal (or restart your IDE) and check node --version.
Git and Git LFS. Run git lfs install once on your computer. The delivered models are LFS objects; without Git LFS you only get small pointer files and the models do not load.
Windows with PowerShell is the primary platform. Linux and macOS use the start.sh and setup.sh counterparts.
About 2 GB of free disk space and network access to git.realvirtual.io and web.realvirtual.io.

Clone and start

Clone the repository from your email into a short local folder, not one inside OneDrive:

git clone https://git.realvirtual.io/<organisation>/<repository>.git

Then run the start script from the repository root, the folder that contains start.ps1 next to realvirtual-web/:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\start.ps1

start.ps1 first runs setup.ps1, which prepares the workspace: it checks Node.js, installs the npm dependencies and downloads realvirtual CONNECT into tools/connect/, verified by its SHA-256 checksum. Then it starts CONNECT, which starts the development server and serves the viewer at http://localhost:5100. Hot reload works there as usual.

First start

The first start takes several minutes: the dependency installation and the CONNECT download (about 225 MB) both report their progress. Your browser opens once the viewer answers. If the installation stalls behind a company proxy or virus scanner, the README describes the offline dependency archive.

realvirtual CONNECT

You do not install CONNECT separately: the workspace downloads it and keeps it in tools/connect/. On the first start the activation dialog appears. Enter the licence key you receive from realvirtual, click Activate and accept the terms once. The key is not part of the repository. Without activation the viewer still runs, but CONNECT functions are limited. See CONNECT licensing for the tiers.

The workspace structure

Folder or file	Purpose
`realvirtual-web/`	The core of realvirtual, the same AGPL codebase as the public Community edition
`realvirtual-web-pro/`	The commercial components, enabled by your licence
`projects/`	Your projects. A standard delivery starts with the demo project only; a development delivery also contains your project
`recipes/`	Step-by-step runbooks, for example deploying to the web, connecting live signals or writing a plugin
`tools/`	Helper scripts and the downloaded realvirtual CONNECT
`start.ps1`, `setup.ps1`	Start and prepare the workspace (`start.sh`, `setup.sh` on Linux and macOS)
`README.md`	Your entry point: setup, daily operation, updates and troubleshooting
`FEATURES.md`	The feature matrix of your delivery
`CLAUDE.md`, `AGENTS.md`	Instructions for coding agents working in the workspace

A project is a folder projects/<your-project>/ with models/, plugins/ and docs/. Everything outside projects/ is replaced by every update, so keep your own work inside it.

Developer documentation

README.md in the repository root covers setup, daily operation and updates.
recipes/ holds the runbooks for common tasks, usable by you or an AI assistant.
The doc-*.md files in realvirtual-web/ describe the architecture, plugins, scripting, signals, projects and publishing in depth.
Online: Extending & Developing points to the development resources on this site.

Where you can run it

On localhost. Running the workspace on your own computer, including virtual commissioning on localhost, is included in every realvirtual commercial licence.
On any web server, internal or external. Serving realvirtual from a web server needs a deployment licence. This applies to company-internal servers just as to public ones. See Publishing a project for how to deploy.
As an appliance. A dedicated box in the plant network can carry the HMI, see Appliance. An appliance serves the HMI over the network and therefore also needs a deployment licence.

The licence terms are in Part B of the realvirtual terms. Prices for deployment licences are on the pricing section of the product page.

Updates

Every realvirtual WEB release is pushed to your repository. Commit your own work, then update with:

git pull

Start again the same way as before. If the update changed the dependencies, run setup.ps1 once first. What changed is listed in the release notes.

Support

Write to professional@realvirtual.io or info@realvirtual.io.