Source code directory structure

Overview

The source code of atom-shell is separated into a few parts, and we are mostly following Chromium on the separation conventions.

You may need to become familiar with Chromium's multi-process architecture to understand the source code better.

app - Contains system entry code, this is the most basic level of the program.
browser - The frontend including the main window, UI, and all browser side things. This talks to the renderer to manage web pages.
- ui - Implementation of UI stuff for different platforms.
- atom - Initializes the javascript environment of browser.
- default_app - The default page to show when atom-shell is started without providing an app.
- api - The implementation of browser side APIs.
  - lib - Javascript part of the API implementation.
renderer - Code that runs in renderer.
- api - The implementation of renderer side APIs.
  - lib - Javascript part of the API implementation.
common - Code that used by both browser and renderer, including some utility functions and code to integrate node's message loop into Chromium's message loop.
- api - The implementation of common APIs, and foundations of atom-shell's built-in modules.
  - lib - Javascript part of the API implementation.
spec - Automatic tests.
script - Scripts for building atom-shell.

vendor - Build dependencies.
tools - Helper scripts to build atom-shell.
node_modules - Third party node modules used for building or running specs.
out - Output directory for ninja.
dist - Temporary directory created by script/create-dist.py script when creating an distribution.
node - Downloaded node binary, it's built from https://github.com/atom/node/tree/chromium-v8.
frameworks - Downloaded third-party binaries of frameworks (only on Mac).