Firebox

Application runtime shared with Firefox that can be used to create cross platform desktop applications such as Firefox itself using web technologies. Applications packages are just Firefox OS Packged Apps.

Usage

Commonly you would install firebox as a devDependency of your npm package / application and run it as such:

node ./node_modules/firebox/firebox.js ./manifest.webapp

Argument passed is a path to an application manifest which is json file with information about the application (follow the link for details).

Commonly one would also add a start script to package.json to just use npm start for lunching app.

Please note that firebox expects to find a nightly build of firefox on your system in order to borrow it's runtime & will fail if it's not installed.

It is also possible to just use Firefox Nightly build by pointing it to firebox, although in that case usage is little more complicated:

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -app /path/to/firebox/application.ini /path/to/app/manifest.webapp

As a matter of fact firebox.js script does the same it just finds a Firefox installation on the system.

Debugging

During development you may want to use debugger, which is possible by passing additional arguments:

# using node 
node ./node_modules/firebox/firebox.js ./manifest.webapp --debugger 6000
 
# using firefox 
/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -app /path/to/firebox/application.ini /path/to/app/manifest.webapp --debugger 6000

If application was lunched with a --debugger flag it will listen on given port (in this case 6000) to which you can connect via Firefox WebIDE.

Examples

You can check actual application example to see how all pieces fit together.