With all modern frameworks, unfortunately, setup is very hard. This has bothered me from day one. Recently, we've tried to ease this in Aurelia by splitting out two separate scenarios:
- I want to give Aurelia a try and learn a few things before building my app.
- I'm ready to build my app and want a production quality setup.
We wanted to make the beginner/learner scenarios very easy. So, we created some "beginner kits". One for ES 2016 and one for TypeScript. All you have to do is download one, unzip it and point a web browser at the index.html page. No installation or setup is required. This is the kit that is used during our "Getting Started" guide.
The second scenario is covered in a guide on "A Production Quality Setup". This kit involves installing NodeJS, gulp, jspm, etc but comes with a very powerful pre-configured project template that handles compiling, bundling, unit testing, e2e testing, linting, etc. Once you have the tools above installed, you can just run the application and begin adding your own code.
We're actively looking for ways to improve all of this. Your feedback is always welcome.