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Development Guide

Welcome, soon-to-be contributor 🙂! This document sums up what you need to know to get started hacking on Nativefier.

Guidelines

  1. Before starting work on a huge change, gauge the interest of community & maintainers through a GitHub issue. For big changes, create a RFC issue to enable a good peer review.

  2. Do your best to avoid adding new Nativefier command-line options. If a new option is inevitable for what you want to do, sure, but as much as possible try to see if you change works without. Nativefier already has a ton of them, making it hard to use.

  3. Do your best to limit breaking changes. Only introduce breaking changes when necessary, when required by deps, or when not breaking would be unreasonable. When you can, support the old thing forever. For example, keep maintaining old flags; to "replace" an flag you want to replace with a better version, you should keep honoring the old flag, and massage it to pass parameters to the new flag, maybe using a wrapper/adapter. Yes, our code will get a tiny bit uglier than it could have been with a hard breaking change, but that would be to ignore our users. Introducing breaking changes willy nilly is a comfort to us developers, but is disrespectful to end users who must constantly bend to the flow of breaking changes pushed by all their software who think it's "just one breaking change". See Rich Hickey - Spec-ulation.

  4. Avoid adding npm dependencies. Each new dep is a complexity & security liability. You might be thinking your extra dep is "just a little extra dep", and maybe you found one that is high-quality & dependency-less. Still, it's an extra dep, and over the life of Nativefier we requested changes to dozens of PRs to avoid "just a little extra dep". Without this constant attention, Nativefier would be more bloated, less stable for users, more annoying to maintainers. Now, don't go rewriting zlib if you need a zlib dep, for sure use a dep. But if you can write a little helper function saving us a dep for a mundane task, go for the helper :) . Also, an in-tree helper will always be less complex than a dep, as inherently more tailored to our use case, and less complexity is good.

  5. Use types, avoid any, write tests.

  6. Document for users in API.md

  7. Document for other devs in comments, jsdoc, commits, PRs. Say why more than what, the what is your code!

Setup

First, clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier.git
cd nativefier

Install dependencies (for both the CLI and the Electron app):

npm ci

The above npm ci will build automatically (through the prepare hook). When you need to re-build Nativefier,

npm run build

Set up a symbolic link so that running nativefier calls your dev version with your changes:

npm link
which nativefier
# -> Should return a path, e.g. /home/youruser/.node_modules/lib/node_modules/nativefier
# If not, be sure your `npm_config_prefix` env var is set and in your `PATH`

After doing so, you can run Nativefier with your test parameters:

nativefier --your-awesome-new-flag 'https://your-test-site.com'

Then run your nativefier app through the command line too (to see logs & errors):

# Under Linux
./your-test-site-linux-x64/your-test-site

# Under Windows
your-test-site-win32-x64/your-test-site.exe

# Under macOS
./YourTestSite-darwin-x64/YourTestSite.app/Contents/MacOS/YourTestSite --verbose

Linting & formatting

Nativefier uses Prettier, which will shout at you for not formatting code exactly like it expects. This guarantees a homogenous style, but is painful to do manually. Do yourself a favor and install a Prettier plugin for your editor.

Tests

  • To run all tests, npm t
  • To run only unit tests, npm run test:unit
  • To run only integration tests, npm run test:integration
  • Logging is suppressed by default in tests, to avoid polluting Jest output. To get debug logs, npm run test:withlog or set the LOGLEVEL env. var.
  • For a good live experience, open two terminal panes/tabs running code/tests watchers:
    1. Run a TSC watcher: npm run build:watch
    2. Run a Jest unit tests watcher: npm run test:watch
    3. Here is a screencast of how the live-reload experience should look like
  • Alternatively, you can run both test processes in the same terminal by running: npm run watch

Maintainers corner

Deps: major-upgrading Electron

When a new major Electron release occurs,

  1. Wait a few weeks to let it stabilize. Never upgrade Nativefier to a .0.0.
  2. Thoroughly digest the new version's breaking changes (also via the Releases page and the blog, the content is different), grepping our codebase for every changed API.
    • If called for by the breaking changes, perform the necessary API changes
  3. Bump
    • src/constants.ts / DEFAULT_ELECTRON_VERSION & DEFAULT_CHROME_VERSION
    • package.json / devDeps / electron
    • app / package.json / devDeps / electron
  4. On Windows, macOS, Linux, test for regression and crashes:
    1. With npm test and npm run test:manual
    2. With extra manual testing
  5. When confident enough, release it in a regression-spelunking-friendly way:
    1. If master has unreleased commits, make a patch/minor release with them, but without the major Electron bump.
    2. Commit your Electron major bump and release it as a major new Nativefier version. Help users identify the breaking change by using a bold [BREAKING] marker in CHANGELOG.md and in the GitHub release.

Deps updates

It is important to stay afloat of dependencies upgrades. In packages ecosystems like npm, there's only one way: forward. The best time to do package upgrades is now / progressively, because:

  1. Slacking on doing these upgrades means you stay behind, and it becomes risky to do them. Upgrading a woefully out-of-date dep from 3.x to 9.x is scarier than 3.x to 4.x, release, then 4.x to 5.x, release, etc... to 9.x.

  2. Also, dependencies applying security patches to old major versions are rare in npm. So, by slacking on upgrades, it becomes more and more probable that we get impacted by a vulnerability. And when this happens, it then becomes urgent & stressful to A. fix the vulnerability, B. do the required major upgrades.

So: do upgrade CLI & App deps regularly! Our release script will remind you about it.

Deps lockfile / shrinkwrap

We do use lockfiles (npm-shrinkwrap.json & app/npm-shrinkwrap.json), for:

  1. Security (avoiding supply chain attacks)
  2. Reproducibility
  3. Performance

It means you might have to update these lockfiles when adding a dependency. npm run relock will help you with that.

Note: we do use npm-shrinkwrap.json rather than package-lock.json because the latter is tailored to libraries, and is not publishable. As documented, CLI tools like Nativefier should use shrinkwrap.

Release

While on master, with no uncommitted changes, run:

npm run changelog -- $VERSION
# With no 'v'. For example: npm run changelog -- '42.5.0'

Do follow semantic versioning, and give visibility to breaking changes in release notes by prefixing their line with [BREAKING].

Triage

These are the guidelines we (try to) follow when triaging issues:

  1. Do your best to conciliate empathy & efficiency, and keep your cool. It’s not always easy 😄😬😭🤬. Get away from triaging if you feel grouchy.

  2. Rename issues. Most issues are badly named, with titles ranging from unclear to flat out wrong. A good backlog is a backlog of issues with clear concise titles, understandable with only the title after you read them once. Rename and clarify.

  3. Ask for clarification & details when needed, and add a need-info label.

    1. In particular, if the issue isn’t reproducible (e.g. a non-trivial bug happening on an internal site), express that we can’t work without a repro scenario, and flag as need-info.

  4. Label issues with category/sorting labels (e.g. mac / linux / windows, bug / feature-request ...) and status labels (e.g. upstream, wontfix, need-info, cannot-reproduce).

  5. Close if needed, but not too much. We do want to close what deserves it, but closing too ruthlessly frustrates and disappoints users, and does us a disservice of not having a clear honest backlog available to us & users. So,

    1. When in doubt, leave issues open and triaged as bug / feature-request. It’s okay, reaching 0 open issues is not an objective. Or if it is, it deserves to be a development objective, not a triage one.
    2. That being said, do close what’s upstream, with a kind message.
    3. Also do close bugs that have been need-info or cannot-reproduce for too long (weeks / months), with a kind message explaining we’re okay to re-open if the requested info / scenario is provided.
    4. Finally, carefully close issues we do not want to address, e.g. requests going against project goals, or bugs & feature requests that are so niche or far-fetched that there’s zero chance of ever seeing them addressed. But if in doubt, remain at point 1. above: leave open, renamed, labelled.

  6. Close duplicates issues and link to the original issue.

    1. To be able to notice dups implies you must know the backlog (one more reason to keep it tidy and palatable). Once in a blue moon, do a "full pass" of the whole backlog from beginning to end, you’ll often find lots of now-irrelevant bugs, and duplicates.

  7. Use GitHub saved replies to automate asking for info and being nice on closing as noanswer / stale-needinfo.

  8. Transform findings stemming from issues discussion into documentation (chiefly, CATALOG.md & API.md), or into code comments.

  9. Don’t scold authors of lame "+1" comments, this only adds to the noise you’re trying to avoid. Instead, hide useless comments as Off-topic. From personal experience, users do understand this signal, and such hidden comments do avoid an avalanche of extra "+1" comments.

    1. There are shades of lame. A literal "+1" comment is frankly useless and is worth hiding. But a comment like "same for me on Windows" at least brings an extra bit of information, so can remain visible.

    2. In a perfect world, GitHub would let us add a note when hiding comments to express "Please use a 👍 reaction on the issue to vote for it instead of posting a +1 comment". In a perfecter world, GitHub would use their AI skillz to automatically detect such comments, discourage them and nudge towards a 👍 reaction. We’re not there yet, so “hidden as off-topic” will do.

  10. Don’t let yourself be abused by abrasive / entitled users. There are plenty of articles documenting open-source burnout and trolls-induced misery. Find an article that speaks to you, and point problematic users to it. I like Brett Cannon - The social contract of open source.