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Building AFFiNE Desktop Client App

Warning:

This document is not guaranteed to be up-to-date. If you find any outdated information, please feel free to open an issue or submit a PR.

Table of Contents

Things you may need to know before getting started

Building the desktop client app for the moment is a bit more complicated than building the web app. The client right now is an Electron app that wraps the prebuilt web app, with parts of the native modules written in Rust, which means we have the following source modules to build a desktop client app:

  1. packages/frontend/core: the web app
  2. packages/frontend/native: the native modules written in Rust (mostly the sqlite bindings)
  3. packages/frontend/electron: the Electron app (containing main & helper process, and the electron entry point in packages/frontend/electron/renderer)

#3 is dependent on #1 and #2, and relies on electron-forge to make the final app & installer. To get a deep understanding of how the desktop client app is built, you may want to read the workflow file in release-desktop.yml.

Due to some limitations of Electron builder, you may need to have two separate yarn config for building the core and the desktop client app:

  1. build frontend (with default yarn settings)
  2. build electron (reinstall with hoisting off)

We will explain the steps in the following sections.

Prerequisites

Before you start building AFFiNE Desktop Client Application, please following the same steps in BUILDING#Prerequisites to install Node.js and Rust.

On Windows, you must enable symbolic links this code repo. See #### Windows.

Build, package & make the desktop client app

0. Build the native modules

Please refer to Build Native Dependencies section in BUILDING.md to build the native modules.

1. Build the core

On Mac & Linux

BUILD_TYPE=canary SKIP_NX_CACHE=1 yarn workspace @affine/electron generate-assets

On Windows (powershell)

$env:BUILD_TYPE="canary"
$env:SKIP_NX_CACHE=1
$env:DISTRIBUTION=desktop
$env:SKIP_WEB_BUILD=1
yarn build --skip-nx-cache

2. Re-config yarn, clean up the node_modules and reinstall the dependencies

As we said before, you need to reinstall the dependencies with hoisting off. You can do this by running the following command:

yarn config set nmMode classic
yarn config set nmHoistingLimits workspaces

Then, clean up all node_modules and reinstall the dependencies:

On Mac & Linux

find . -name 'node_modules' -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
yarn install

On Windows (powershell)

dir -Path . -Filter node_modules -recurse | foreach {echo $_.fullname; rm -r -Force $_.fullname}
yarn install

3. Build the desktop client app installer

Mac & Linux

Note: you need to comment out osxSign and osxNotarize in forge.config.js to skip signing and notarizing the app.

BUILD_TYPE=canary SKIP_WEB_BUILD=1 HOIST_NODE_MODULES=1 yarn workspace @affine/electron make

Windows

Making the windows installer is a bit different. Right now we provide two installer options: squirrel and nsis.

$env:BUILD_TYPE="canary"
$env:SKIP_WEB_BUILD=1
$env:HOIST_NODE_MODULES=1
yarn workspace @affine/electron package
yarn workspace @affine/electron make-squirrel
yarn workspace @affine/electron make-nsis

Once the build is complete, you can find the paths to the binaries in the terminal output.

Finished 2 bundles at:
  › Artifacts available at: <affine-repo>/packages/frontend/electron/out/make

CI

Please refer to .github/workflows/release-desktop-app.yml for the CI workflow. It will:

  • build the app for all supported platforms
  • upload the artifacts to GitHub Actions