@kui-shell/builder

Packaging up Kui

NOTE: Internal consumption only! Don't use this directly!

Beyond local development of Kui, you may want to package and distribute Kui to others. The code base currently supports three packaging modes:

• Headless — making a lightweight headless release
• Electron — building an Electron client app
• Browser — building for the browser, using webpack

Headless packaging

> cd dist/headless && ./build.sh
> ls dist/builds
Kui-headless.tar.bz2 Kui-headless.zip

Electron packaging

Kui uses electron-packager for the heavy lifting. The electron-packager npm supports building for Windows, macOS, and Linux. When building an Electron distribution, the script by default will build for all three platforms.

> (cd dist/electron && ./build.sh [target])
> ls dist/builds
Kui-darwin-x64.dmg Kui-darwin-x64.tar.bz2 Kui-win32-x64.zip Kui-linux-x64.tar.bz2

To test out builds on your laptop, you may wish only to build for one platform. You can do so by adding a target option, which is one of win32, mac, or linux. If you only want the Electron double-clickable, and not the distributables (e.g. the dmg and zip files), set the NO_INSTALLER=true environment variable when executing build.sh.

Browser packaging

To build for use in a browser, Kui uses webpack. Before your first webpack build, make sure to issue an npm install from within the dist/webpack directory:

> cd dist/webpack && npm install && ./build.sh
> ls dist/webpack/build
... lots of *.bundle.js.br files ...

After you have built the webpack bundles, you can test them out locally:

> cd dist/webpack && npm run http
Now visit this url:
https://localhost:8080/app/build/index-webpack-local.html

The first time you do so, you will be asked to set up a local https certificate. You should see the normal openssl series of prompts; make sure that you provide at least one non-empty answer to the self-signed certificate prompts, otherwise it will fail in odd ways.