deskfiler

Quick Start

Just follow these instructions to get yourself set-up!

OS-specific instructions

Deskfiler is a cross-platform Electron.js app, so you will need OS-level build tools to be able to build native dependencies such as hummusjs

Windows

Make sure, you have the build tools to compile native Addon modules installed with node-gyp (eg. Visual Studio Community Edition).

There are great guidelines from microsoft on the topic.

MacOS

On OSX, make sure to install the console tools for Xcode to recompile node modules as needed.

Instructions

  1. Ensure you have Node version 10.x or higher installed by running node -v, if you don’t have node installed, refer to Installing node appendix
  2. Ensure you have yarn installed or install it by either using curl -o- -L https://yarnpkg.com/install.sh | bash or downloading it from here
  3. Install required npm modules
    yarn global add cross-env concurrently
    

    “concurrently” is used in the build process to parallelize the build process.

  4. Check out and compile
     git clone https://github.com/deskfiler/deskfiler.git
     cd deskfiler
     npm install crc  # if you do not have it globally
     yarn install
     yarn bootstrap:plugins:all
     yarn build:plugins:all
     yarn dev
    

    Once checked out, you can also see your build options with

     yarn run
    

Done! You should now see blank Deskfiler window open with DevTools enabled.

What’s next?

Here you have two options either developing your own plugin, or working on Deskfiler core.

Plugin Development

Most awesome thing about the deskfiler is that you can create your plugins for it obviously! Deskfiler plugins are intended to work with files, but you can actually run any arbitrary JS code inside the plugin container.

If you want to create something cool, please refer to plugin development reference

Also, check out deskfiler plugin ideas.

Deskfiler development

Dive into the code to understand how Deskfiler works from inside with help of the architecture reference, take a look at the issues and find yourself something you feel ready to tackle!

During the developemnt, you may compile a production distributables for your system to test them, check this guide to get to know how to do it

Appendix

Installing node

A nice way to manage node environment on your system is by using “Node Version Manager” Install it using installation instructions on their github repo, confirm it’s installed by running nvm -c and then run nvm install latest && nvm use latest.

After downloading and installing node, nvm will create something like virtualenv for your node, and you will see the latest node version installed which can also be verified with node -v