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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Appium Desktop

There are a lot of different ways to contribute to Appium Desktop. See below to learn more about how Appium Desktop is developed and for everything you can do and the processes to follow for each contribution method. Note that no matter how you contribute, your participation is governed by our Code of Conduct.

Overview

Appium Desktop is an Electron app. Electron apps have a basic architecture that consists of a main process (which runs Node.js) and possibly many renderer processes (essentially browser windows which display HTML/CSS and can run JS---this is where the UI lives). Interactions between the two types of process are made possible by a built-in interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism.

For the UI, Appium Desktop is built using React and Redux for managing UI state and interactions, with Ant Design for various UI components.

Why did we decide to go this route?

  • Electron bundles apps for any platform
  • Appium is written in JS so it's a nice way to stick with that as the main language; we can rely on Appium's community to maintain this app and follow Appium's coding standards
  • Using web technologies to build a UI is a skill that many people have, whereas building native UIs is more esoteric
  • Because Electron's main process runs in Node, we can import Appium as a strict dependency rather than be forced to manage it as a subprocess. This is great for speed and error handling
  • It's fun!

Credits where credit is due: for the project's tooling, we started with electron-react-boilerplate, which comes with an excellent set of helpers scripts, many of which we still use in an unmodified fashion. Many thanks to that project!

Setting up

  1. Clone the repo
  2. Install dependencies (npm install)

Doing Development

There is a handy script for preparing the code and launching a development version of the app:

npm run dev

This launches both the app and a development server which feeds UI code changes to the app as you make them (this is called 'hot reload'). In most cases, if you're simply making UI changes, you won't need to relaunch the app in order to see them reflected. If you do, simply kill this script and start again.

Another important thing to do before committing is to run a lint tool on your code:

npm run lint

Finally, you might want to run the app in a non-development mode in order to make sure that everything works as expected if you were to publish:

npm run build  # prepare resources
npm start  # start a production version of the app

Packaging and Releasing

To package the app for your platform, run:

npm run package

To package the app for all platforms, run:

npm run package-all

This will build the apps with the latest version of electron and put the various app packages in release/.

npm version <VERSION_TYPE>

This will increment the version and push a new tag. This will trigger AppVeyor and Travis CI to run a CI build process and then publish the assets (.dmg, .exe, .AppImage) to GitHub releases which will contain a draft of the new release.

Appium Desktop follows the same npm versioning workflow but isn't published to NPM.

Submitting changes to the Appium Desktop code or docs

Fork the project, make a change, and send a pull request! Please have a look at our Style Guide before getting to work. Please make sure functional tests pass before sending a pull request; for more information on how to run tests, keep reading!

Make sure you read and follow the setup instructions in the README first. And note that all participation in the Appium community (including code submissions) is governed by our Code of Conduct.

Finally, before we accept your code, you will need to have signed our Contributor License Agreement. Instructions will be given by the GitHub Bot when you make a pull request.

Submit bug reports or feature requests

Just use the GitHub issue tracker to submit your bug reports and feature requests. If you are submitting a bug report, please follow the issue template.