enso/gui/docs/contributing.md

Development & Contributing Guide

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Enso IDE! We believe that only through community involvement can Enso be the best it can be! There are a whole host of ways to contribute, and every single one is appreciated.

Reporting Issues

If you are concerned that your bug publicly presents a security risk to the users of Enso, please contact security@enso.org.

While it's never great to find a bug, they are a reality of software and software development! We can't fix or improve on the things that we don't know about, so report as many bugs as you can! If you're not sure whether something is a bug, file it anyway!

Even though GitHub search can be a bit hard to use sometimes, we'd appreciate if you could search for your issue before filing a bug as it's possible that someone else has already reported the issue. We know the search isn't the best, and it can be hard to know what to search for, so we really don't mind if you do submit a duplicate!

Opening an issue is as easy as following this link and filling out the fields. The template is intended to collect all the information we need to best diagnose the issue, so please take the time to fill it out accurately.

The reproduction steps are particularly important, as the more easily we can reproduce it, the faster we can fix the bug! It's also helpful to have the version of the IDE, as that will let us know if the bug is Operating System or Architecture specific.

Development Environment

The project builds on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Cross-platform targets work well on all of these platforms, however, MacOS package will miss the right application icon if built on Linux or Windows due to non-trival icon generation on these platforms. In order to develop the source code you will need the following setup:

• The Rust Toolchain (nightly-2019-11-04)

  This project uses several features available only in the nightly Rust toolchain. Please use the the Rust toolchain installer to install it:

  rustup toolchain install nightly-2019-11-04 # Install the nightly channel.
  rustup override set nightly-2019-11-04      # Set it as the default toolchain for this folder.
  rustup component add clippy                 # Install the linter.
  cargo install wasm-pack --version 0.8.1     # Install the wasm-pack toolkit.
  cargo install cargo-watch                   # To enable ./run watch utility
  

• Node and Node Package Manager LTS

  In order to build the web and desktop applications you will need the latest LTS version of node and npm. Even minor release changes are known to cause serious issues, thus we provide support for the latest LTS version only. Please do not report build issues if you use other versions. In case you run run MacOS or Linux the easiest way to set up the proper version is by installing the Node Version Manager and running nvm install --lts && nvm use --lts.

• (Optional) FlatBuffer compiler flatc

  This dependency is needed only if you need to update files generated by the FlatBuffer from the Engine Services binary protocol description. Otherwise, relying on the generated files that are being stored in this repository is fine.

  flatc must be in version newer than 1.12 due to this bug. As of writing this text there are no official releases with this issue fixed, however current binaries can be obtained from the project's CI build artifacts.

Working with sources

Please note that you should not use a code auto-formatter in this codebase. Please read the following documents to learn more about reasons behind this decision and the recommended code style guide. Be sure to carefully read the Rust style guide 1 and the Rust style guide 2 before contributing to the codebase.

Setting up Engine Services

IDE requires a service named Project Picker to be running in the background on the local machine. The service, being part of the Enso Engine, currently must be built from the sources on the enso repository. If the service is not running, the IDE will not start.

However, it is possible to hack on many components of the IDE without the service. The debug scenes and tests will work even without the Project Picker.

To run Project Picker, it must be first built — please follow the Enso Engine contributing guidelines to obtain sources and necessary tools. When they are in place, the service can be built and started by issuing the following command in the enso repository root:

sbt -java-home $JAVA_HOME -J-Xss10M project-manager/run

Where $JAVA_HOME is the path where graalvm-ce-java8-20.0.0 is located.

In future significant improvements to this process are planned, specifically:

• not requiring the engine to be able to start the IDE;
• providing self-contained Project Picker service packages.

Development

As this is a multi-part project with many complex dependencies, it is equipped with a build script which both validates your working environment as well as takes care of providing the most suitable compilation flags for a particular development stage. In order to run the build script simply run node ./run in the root of the codebase. On MacOS and Linux you can use a simpler form of ./run, however, this doc will use the former form in order to stay cross-platform compatible. Run node ./run help to learn about available commands and options. All arguments provided after the -- symbol will be passed to sub-commands. For example node ./run build -- --dev will pass the --dev flag to cargo (Rust build tool). The most common options are presented below:

• Interactive mode Run node ./run watch to start a local web-server and a source-file watch utility which will build the project on every change. Open http://localhost:8080 (the port may vary and will be reported in the terminal if 8080 was already in use) to run the application, or http://localhost:8080/debug to open example demo scenes. Please remember to disable the cache in your browser during the development! By default, the script disables heavyweight optimizations to provide interactive development experience. The scripts are thin wrappers for wasm-pack and accept the same command line arguments.

• Production mode In order to compile in a production mode (enable all optimizations, strip WASM debug symbols, minimize the output binaries, etc.), run node ./run build. To create platform-specific packages and installers use node ./run dist instead. The final packages will be located at app/dist/native.

Testing, Linting, and Validation

After changing the code it's always a good idea to lint and test the code. We have prepared several scripts which maximally automate the process:

• Size Validation Use node ./run check-size to check if the size of the final binary did not grew too much in comparison to the previous release. Watching the resulting binary size is one of the most important responsibility of each contributor in order to keep the project small and suitable for web-based usage.

• Testing For the test suite to run you need a current version of Chrome installed. Use node ./run test run both unit and web-based visual test.

  • Note for Windows users: there is a known issue with wasm-pack using the wrong version of the chrome driver. There is a workaround described in the issue: download compatible ChromeDriver from the official source and ensure it is in your PATH.

• Linting Please be sure to fix all errors reported by node ./run lint before creating a pull request to this repository.