Build.md

Working with the sources

When working with the WebCord, there're many tools you may have to use to be able to compile it from TypeScript to JavaScript, package it to the distributable format, run linter and so on. This section will describe the commands you may need to know to proceed with its development or packaging it yourself from its source code.

ℹ️	To simplify the documentation, only npm command syntax is shown below. If you prefer using another package manager, you're free to do so as in my philosophy you should not be limited with the set of tools used by maintainers and have the right to choose your own.

⚠️	WebCord comes with package-lock.json as a lock file format and your preffered package manager might not be functional with it. You still can install the latest dependencies, yet the created lockfile will not be used to reproduce the tested enviroment when a dependency breakage will occur.

Install app dependencies.

This is the first command you need to execute – without that, you won't be able to proceed with the app testing and run most of the commands listed in package.json.

npm ci

This command uses package-lock.json which contains resolved package tree for faster package installations. While package-lock.json contains the dependency tree confirmed to work in the past or in case of the releases it can also be used to reproduce the builds, you might want to opt-in for the latest non-breaking (according to semver specification) dependencies that might contain bug fixes and security patches. This normally won't cause any breakages and you could still go back to the previous state with git if anything goes wrong.

To update dependencies to the latest version available:

npm update

Be aware that npm ci will also install the development dependencies. This is probably what you want, as those dependencies includes all of the recommended packages required for compiling, linting and packaging WebCord. If you however want to install the production dependencies only (i.e. you want to use your own set of the tools or have installed them globally with npm i -g), you can use the following command instead:

npm i --only=prod

Compile code and run app directly (without packaging).

After you have installed all required dependencies and devDependencies, you can use the following command to incrementally compile WebCord's source code from TypeScript to JavaScript:

npm run build

To both compile code and start application even before it is packaged:

npm start

Run linter and validate the code.

While developing, you may want to check if your code quality is enough to be accepted as part of the WebCord project. To do that, you may want to both compile it (to ensure there're no compiler errors) and run linter (to check for the other issues). To do this, you can use the command below:

npm test

You can also run linter only if you don't want to compile the code:

npm run lint

Packaging / creating distributables.

If you want to share with someone the binaries of your packaged application, or just install and/or use it without the source code and development packages, you can generate all distributable files that are valid for your platform using following command:

npm run make

You can also create a directory containing a packaged app. This directory isn't adapted for a specific distributable format, but it contains the Electron binary with the compiled application, which needs to be set up manually if you want to install it within your OS. To package an application without packing it as distributable, execute the following command:

npm run package

This will package the app for your current platform.

Build environment variables.

While making app distributables with the npm run make you can use some environment variables that will take effect on the application before it is packaged. See Flags.md for the further information.