Chronicles

Journaling for the absent minded

Status: Experimental. This application is still in the prototype phase, the UX, functionality, and storage format may change at any time and with little regard for usability, stability, or appearances. However breaking changes will be called out in releases and upcoming changes may be found in pinned issues; see the roadmap for the longer term plan. As long as the application is developed it will be kept up to date.

Development

The app is a typical Electron dev setup, excepting the use of esbuild.

# install dependencies
yarn

# start the development build and watch script
yarn start

# If error with sqlite library versions
yarn run electron-rebuild --force

See scripts/dev.js for specifics on how the source files are compiled and re-loaded in development.

Tech stack

• Electron and esbuild
• Typescript
• React and mobx
• Slate and Plate (Notion style WSYIWYG)

Testing

• Use yarn test to run unit tests
• No end to end testing, yet

Unit tests rely on esbuild to bundle test files, after conflicts getting esm, ts-node, and mocha to play nice.

Build and release (MacOS)

Builds are run locally; the build output is manually uploaded to Github releases. As of this writing, only MacoS is supported; PRs for Windows or Linux support are welcome, but open an issue with a suggested plan first (it may require multiple changes).

• Tag the latest commit
• Use yarn build
• Delete the .app file, keep the .pkg file; zip the contents
• Make a Github release; attach the build output (zip file)

At a high level, the build is comprised of:

• generate bundles (esbuild) from source files
• install production dependencies
• re-build native dependencies for the targeted electron version
• package the app and sign it

OSX Certificates

To sign the application, you need the signing certificate from Apple. Electron has good documentation on this process. This is roughly:

• Create and pay for an Apple developer account
• Generate certificates in xcode
• Export them; install them to local keychain
• The build process picks up this info and prompts you for them, "Allow all" (it signs repeatedly)

This is only necessary for official releases. If you want to download this repo, customize it, and build your test changes, comment out the osx sign attribute in package.js and run yarn build, then check the packaged directory for the latest build.