signal-desktop/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributor Guidelines

Advice for new contributors

Start small. The PRs most likely to be merged are the ones that make small, easily reviewed changes with clear and specific intentions. See below for more guidelines on pull requests.

It's a good idea to gauge interest in your intended work by finding the current issue for it or creating a new one yourself. You can use also that issue as a place to signal your intentions and get feedback from the users most likely to appreciate your changes.

You're most likely to have your pull request accepted easily if it addresses bugs already in the Next Steps project, especially if they are near the top of the Backlog column. Those are what we'll be looking at next, so it would be a great help if you helped us out!

Once you've spent a little bit of time planning your solution, it's a good idea to go back to the issue and talk about your approach. We'd be happy to provide feedback. An ounce of prevention, as they say!

Developer Setup

First, you'll need Node.js which matches our current version. You can check .nvmrc in the development branch to see what the current version is. If you have nvm you can just run nvm use in the project directory and it will switch to the project's desired Node.js version. nvm for windows is still useful, but it doesn't support .nvmrc files.

Then you need git, if you don't have that yet: https://git-scm.com/

And for the final step before we actually get started, you'll need build tools to install the native modules used by the application. On Windows, it's easiest to open the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator and run this:

npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

On OSX you can install the XCode Command-line tools. On Linux you'll need to take a trip to your favorite package manager. Python 2.x and GCC are two key necessary components.

Now, run these commands in your preferred terminal in a good directory for development:

git clone https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop.git
cd Signal-Desktop
npm install --global yarn      # (only if you don’t already have yarn)
yarn install --frozen-lockfile # Install and build dependencies (this will take a while)
yarn grunt                     # Generate final JS and CSS assets
yarn icon-gen                  # Generate full set of icons for Electron
yarn test                      # A good idea to make sure tests run first
yarn start                     # Start Signal!

You'll need to restart the application regularly to see your changes, as there is no automatic restart mechanism.

Also, note that the assets loaded by the application are not necessarily the same files you're touching. You may not see your changes until you run yarn grunt on the command-line like you did during setup. You can make it easier on yourself by generating the latest built assets when you change a file. Run this in its own terminal instance while you make changes:

yarn grunt dev # runs until you stop it, re-generating built assets on file changes

Setting up standalone

By default the application will connect to the staging servers, which means that you will not be able to link it with your primary mobile device.

Fear not! You don't have to link the app with your phone. During setup in development mode, you'll be presented with a 'Standalone' button which goes through the registration process like you would on a phone. But you won't be linked to any other devices.

The staging environment

Sadly, this default setup results in no contacts and no message history, an entirely empty application. But you can use the information from your production install of Signal Desktop to populate your testing application!

First, find your application data:

• OSX: ~/Library/Application Support/Signal
• Linux: ~/.config/Signal
• Windows 10: C:\Users\<YourName>\AppData\Roaming\Signal

Now make a copy of this production data directory in the same place, and call it Signal-development. Now start up the development version of the app as normal, and you'll see all of your contacts and messages!

You'll notice a prompt to re-link, because your production credentials won't work on staging. Click 'Relink', then 'Standalone', then verify the phone number and click 'Send SMS.'

Once you've entered the confirmation code sent to your phone, you are registered as a standalone staging device with your normal phone number, and a copy of your production message history and contact list.

Here's the catch: you can't message any of these contacts, since they haven't done the same thing. Who can you message for testing?

Additional storage profiles

What you need for proper testing is additional phone numbers, to register additional standalone devices. You can get them via Twilio ($1/mo. per number + $0.0075 per SMS), or via Google Voice (one number per Google Account, free SMS).

Once you have the additional numbers, you can setup additional storage profiles and switch between them using the NODE_APP_INSTANCE environment variable.

For example, to create an 'alice' profile, put a file called local-alice.json in the config directory:

{
  "storageProfile": "aliceProfile"
}

Then you can start up the application a little differently to load the profile:

NODE_APP_INSTANCE=alice yarn run start

This changes the userData directory from %appData%/Signal to %appData%/Signal-aliceProfile.

Making changes

So you're in the process of preparing that pull request. Here's how to make that go smoothly.

Tests

Please write tests! Our testing framework is mocha and our assertion library is chai.

The easiest way to run all tests at once is yarn test.

You can browse tests from the command line with grunt unit-tests or in an interactive session with NODE_ENV=test yarn run start. The libtextsecure tests are run similarly: grunt lib-unit-tests and NODE_ENV=test-lib yarn run start. You can tweak the appropriate test.html for both of these runs to get code coverage numbers via blanket.js (it's shown at the bottom of the web page when the run is complete).

To run Node.js tests, you can run yarn test-server from the command line. You can get code coverage numbers for this kind of run via yarn test-server-coverage, then display the report with yarn open-coverage.

Pull requests

So you wanna make a pull request? Please observe the following guidelines.

• Please do not submit pull requests for translation fixes. Anyone can update the translations in Transifex.
• Never use plain strings right in the source code - pull them from messages.json! You only need to modify the default locale _locales/en/messages.json. Other locales are generated automatically based on that file and then periodically uploaded to Transifex for translation.
• Rebase your changes on the latest development branch, resolving any conflicts. This ensures that your changes will merge cleanly when you open your PR.
• Be sure to add and run tests!
• Make sure the diff between our master and your branch contains only the minimal set of changes needed to implement your feature or bugfix. This will make it easier for the person reviewing your code to approve the changes. Please do not submit a PR with commented out code or unfinished features.
• Avoid meaningless or too-granular commits. If your branch contains commits like the lines of "Oops, reverted this change" or "Just experimenting, will delete this later", please squash or rebase those changes away.
• Don't have too few commits. If you have a complicated or long lived feature branch, it may make sense to break the changes up into logical atomic chunks to aid in the review process.
• Provide a well written and nicely formatted commit message. See this link for some tips on formatting. As far as content, try to include in your summary
  1. What you changed
  2. Why this change was made (including git issue # if appropriate)
  3. Any relevant technical details or motivations for your implementation choices that may be helpful to someone reviewing or auditing the commit history in the future. When in doubt, err on the side of a longer commit message.

Above all, spend some time with the repository. Follow the pull request template added to your pull request description automatically. Take a look at recent approved pull requests, see how they did things.

Linking to a staging mobile device

Multiple standalone desktop devices are great for testing of a lot of scenarios. But a lot of the Signal experience requires a primary mobile device: contact management, synchronizing read and verification states among all linked devices, etc.

This presents a problem - even if you had another phone, the production versions of the iOS and Android apps are locked to the production servers. To test all secenarios in staging, your best bet is to pull down the development version of the iOS or Android app, and register it with one of your extra phone numbers:

First, build Signal for Android or iOS from source, and point its TextSecure service URL to textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org:

on Android: Replace the SIGNAL_URL value in build.gradle

on iOS: Replace the textSecureServerURL value in TSConstants.h(located in the SignalServiceKit pod)

This task is 1% search and replace, 99% setting up your build environment. Instructions are available for both the Android and iOS projects.

Then you can set up your development build of Signal Desktop as normal. If you've already set up as a standalone install, you can switch by opening the DevTools (View -> Toggle Developer Tools) and entering this into the Console and pressing enter: window.owsDesktopApp.appView.openInstaller();

Changing to production

If you're completely sure that your changes will have no impact to the production servers, you can connect your development build to the production server by putting a file called local-development.json in the config directory that looks like this:

{
  "serverUrl": "https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org",
  "cdnUrl": "https://cdn.signal.org"
}

Beware: Setting up standalone with your primary phone number when connected to the production servers will unregister your mobile device! All messages from your contacts will go to your new development desktop app instead of your phone.

Testing Production Builds

To test changes to the build system, build a release using

yarn generate
yarn build-release

Then, run the tests using grunt test-release:osx --dir=release, replacing osx with linux or win depending on your platform.

Dependencies

Note: You probably won't end up doing this. Feel free to skip for now.

Dependencies are managed by bower and built with grunt. To change them, you'll need to install node and npm, then run npm install to install bower, grunt, and related plugins.

Adding a bower component

Add the package name and version to bower.json under 'dependencies' or bower install package-name --save

Next update the "preen" config in bower.json with the list of files we will actually use from the new package, e.g.:

  "preen": {
    "package-name": [
      "path/to/main.js",
      "directory/**/*.js"
    ],
    ...
  }

If you'd like to add the new dependency to js/components.js to be included on all html pages, simply append the package name to the concat.app list in bower.json. Take care to insert it in the order you would like it concatenated.

Now, run grunt to delete unused package files and build js/components.js.

Finally, stage and commit changes to bower.json, js/components.js, and components/. The latter should be limited to files we actually use.