Portable Version?

[hack-wizard]

I was curious eDEX-UI can be installed or compiled in such a way that it will run completely from a flash drive, and leave nothing on the filesystem of the computer (or at least remove them on termination). Is this something that can be done without major recoding and if so how?

[GitSquared]

Shouldn't be too hard:

• change electron-builder options in package.json to make a portable exec build
• change all the hard-coded paths in src/_boot.js to relative paths so config isn't written to the computer disk's, but to the flash drive

[hack-wizard]

Yeah, that's just hanging on me, this is the output:

It's worth noting Visual Studio Build tools are already installed so the hanging step is probably unnecessary. is it possible for me to mod the config for this to bypass the hanging step? If so where would that be done?

[GitSquared]

You can skip the pre-script that installs VSB tools by running npm run install-windows --ignore-scripts, if npm --version >= 7 (if not, upgrade with npm i -g npm@latest).

[hack-wizard]

Seemed to work, but now I'm getting this:

Any idea what I'm doing wrong or missing?

[GitSquared]

(Sorry for the delay, just started a new job and I'm a bit busy)

@hack-wizard could you share what modifications you made?

also, you don't need to run the build steps if you're starting with npm start

[hack-wizard]

Ok the first change was to package.json in the main dir of the stable 2.2.7 release:

"build-windows-portable": "node_modules\\.bin\\electron-builder build --win=portable",

Maybe that was not sufficient or I did that in the wrong place?

Also added this to _boot.js in the src dir:

// setting local config path for portable build,
// variable replaces all instances of electron.app.getPath("userData")
const LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH = path.join(process.cwd(), 'edex-config');

And as indicated in the commend used the find and replace function to replace all instances of electron.app.getPath("userData") with the variable LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH in the following code blocks:

const settingsFile = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "settings.json");
const shortcutsFile = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "shortcuts.json");
const lastWindowStateFile = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "lastWindowState.json");
const themesDir = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "themes");
const innerThemesDir = path.join(__dirname, "assets/themes");
const kblayoutsDir = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "keyboards");
const innerKblayoutsDir = path.join(__dirname, "assets/kb_layouts");
const fontsDir = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "fonts");
const innerFontsDir = path.join(__dirname, "assets/fonts");

// Unset proxy env variables to avoid connection problems on the internal websockets
// See #222
if (process.env.http_proxy) delete process.env.http_proxy;
if (process.env.https_proxy) delete process.env.https_proxy;

// Fix userData folder not setup on Windows
try {
    fs.mkdirSync(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH);
    signale.info(`Created config dir at ${LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH}`);
} catch(e) {
    signale.info(`Base config dir is ${LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH}`);
}
// Create default settings file
if (!fs.existsSync(settingsFile)) {
    fs.writeFileSync(settingsFile, JSON.stringify({
        shell: (process.platform === "win32") ? "powershell.exe" : "bash",
        shellArgs: '',
        cwd: LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH,
        keyboard: "en-US",
        theme: "tron",
        termFontSize: 15,
        audio: true,
        audioVolume: 1.0,
        disableFeedbackAudio: false,
        clockHours: 24,
        pingAddr: "1.1.1.1",
        port: 3000,
        nointro: false,
        nocursor: false,
        forceFullscreen: true,
        allowWindowed: false,
        excludeThreadsFromToplist: true,
        hideDotfiles: false,
        fsListView: false,
        experimentalGlobeFeatures: false,
        experimentalFeatures: false
    }, "", 4));
    signale.info(`Default settings written to ${settingsFile}`);
}

// Version history logging
const versionHistoryPath = path.join(LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH, "versions_log.json");
var versionHistory = fs.existsSync(versionHistoryPath) ? require(versionHistoryPath) : {};
var version = app.getVersion();
if (typeof versionHistory[version] === "undefined") {
	versionHistory[version] = {
		firstSeen: Date.now(),
		lastSeen: Date.now()
	};
} else {
	versionHistory[version].lastSeen = Date.now();
}

Did I miss something or replace a path I should not have?

[chromer030]

Linux's Appimages are portable by default.

[hack-wizard]

Good to know, but most (if not all) of the computers I'd be using this on at work are Windows based.

[GitSquared]

Yes, but edex is hardcoded to write config files to ~/.config.