urbit/pkg/interface/CONTRIBUTING.md

Introduction

Thanks for your interest in contributing to the Urbit interface. This section specifically focuses on Landscape development. Landscape lets you integrate your ship with front-end web applications accessed through the browser. It has a core set of applications that accept contributions.

Related to Landscape is Gall, the Arvo vane that controls userspace applications. Landscape applications will usually make good use of Gall, but it's not strictly required if a Landscape application is not interacting with ships directly.

Starting the dev environment

From this directory, go to the config folder and copy urbitrc-sample to urbitrc.

You should see the following:

module.exports = {
  URBIT_PIERS: [
    "/Users/user/ships/zod/home",
  ],
  herb: false,
  URL: 'http://localhost:80'
};

Change the URL to your livenet ship (if making front-end changes) or keep it the same (if developing on a local development ship). Then, from 'pkg/interface':

npm ci
npm run start

The dev server will start at http://localhost:9000. Sign in as you would normally. Landscape will refresh automatically as you make changes.

Multi ship environments

If you are testing across multiple ships at once, and you would like to be able to run the development server against all of the ships simulataneously, then do the following.

Add an object under the FLEET key to your urbitrc.

module.exports = {
  URL: 'http://localhost:80',
  FLEET: {
    'zod': 'http://localhost:8080',
    'bus': 'http://localhost:8081',
    'nus': 'http://localhost:8082'
  }
};

The dev environment will attempt to match the subdomain against the keys of this object, and if matched will proxy to the corresponding URL. For example, the above config will proxy zod.localhost:9000 to http://localhost:8080, bus.localhost:9000 to http://localhost:8081 and so on and so forth. If no match is found, then it will fallback to the URL property.

Linting

The Urbit interface uses Eslint to lint the JavaScript code. To install the linter and for usage through the command, do the following:

$ cd ./pkg/interface
$ npm ci
$ npm run lint

To use the linter, run npm scripts

$ npm run lint # lints all files in `interface`
$ npm run lint-file ./src/apps/chat/**/*.js # lints all .js files in `interface/chat`
$ npm run lint-file ./src/chat/app.js # lints a single chosen file

Creating your own applications

If you'd like to create your own application for Landscape, the easiest way to get started is using the create-landscape-app repository template. It provides a brief wizard when you run it with npm start, and has good documentation for its everyday use -- just create a repo using its template, install and then start it, and you'll soon be up and running.