AFFiNE/docs/BUILDING.md

Building AFFiNE Web

Note

For developing & building desktop client app, please refer to building-desktop-client-app.md

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Setup Environment
• Start Development Server
• Testing

Prerequisites

AFFiNE client has both Node.js & Rust toolchains.

Install Node.js

We suggest develop our product under node.js LTS(Long-term support) version

Option 1: Manually install node.js

install Node LTS version

Up to now, the major node.js version is 18.x

Option 2: Use node version manager

install nvm

nvm install 18
nvm use 18

Install Rust Tools

Please follow the official guide at https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.

Setup Node.js Environment

This setup requires modern yarn (currently 3.x), run this if your yarn version is 1.x

Reference: Yarn installation doc

corepack enable
corepack prepare yarn@stable --activate

# install dependencies
yarn install

Build Native Dependencies

Run the following script. It will build the native module at /packages/native and build Node.js binding using NAPI.rs. This could take a while if you build it for the first time.
Note: use strip from system instead of binutils if you are runinng MacOS. see problem here

yarn workspace @affine/native build

Debugging the Electron App

You need to run two scripts to run the app in development mode

Firstly, run the web app which is served at :8080

yarn dev # you may want to chose `dev - 100.84.105.99:11001` when selecting the dev server

Secondly, bring up the electron app

yarn workspace @affine/electron dev

If everything goes well, you should see the AFFiNE App window popping up in a few seconds. 🎉

Testing

Adding test cases is strongly encouraged when you contribute new features and bug fixes.

We use Playwright for E2E test, and vitest for unit test. To test locally, please make sure browser binaries are already installed via npx playwright install. Also make sure you have built the @affine/web workspace before running E2E tests.

yarn  build
# run tests in headless mode in another terminal window
yarn test

Troubleshooting

I ran yarn start -p 8080 after yarn build but the index page returned 404.

Try stopping your development server (initialized by yarn dev:local or something) and running yarn build again.