safe_app_nodejs

A safe_app library for Node.js.

Maintainer: Gabriel Viganotti (gabriel.viganotti@maidsafe.net)

Linux/OS X	Windows	Coverage Status

API Documentation

The documentation for the latest safe_app_nodejs API is available at http://docs.maidsafe.net/safe_app_nodejs/. See the 'Generate API docs' section further down for instructions to generate this docs locally.

Development

1. Prerequisites

   • Node.js ^8.0.0 (we recommend installing it via nvm)
   • Git
   • Yarn (as a replacement for npm).
   • Windows-specific:
     • Yarn attempts to build modules concurrently with multiple child processes, which causes intermittent timing issues on Windows. Users need to run yarn config set child-concurrency 1 just once to effect local yarn settings.
     • In order to be able to build native Node modules for this library, run npm install --global --production windows-build-tools which installs Python 2.x, Visual Studio 2015 build tools, and Visual C++ build tools.

2. Clone this GitHub repository:

   git clone https://github.com/maidsafe/safe_app_nodejs.git

3. Install the dependencies:

   cd safe_app_nodejs
   yarn

Testing

To run the tests locally, run yarn test.

Note: If you are compiling your own safe_app library for testing purposes, and if you want to be able to run the tests, make sure to include testing in your build features when compiling safe_app in safe_client_libs, i.e. cargo build --release --features "use-mock-routing testing".

Mobile Development

If you do not require system_uri and would like to prevent it from downloading, first set NODE_ENV environment variable to either mobile_prod or mobile_dev before running yarn.

Generate API docs

The documentation for the latest safe_app_nodejs API is published at http://docs.maidsafe.net/safe_app_nodejs/. If you are otherwise using a previous version of this package, you can also generate the API docs locally. Make sure you first install this package's dependencies with yarn, then execute the following command:

yarn docs

The API docs will be generated under the docs folder, you can simply open the docs/index.html file with your default browser.

Experimental APIs

You are free to use any of the experimental APIs to explore the features that are being actively designed and developed.

Although you should be aware of the fact that all/any of the experimental APIs may be changed, deprecated, or even removed in the future, and without much anticipated notification by the core developers.

The reason they are exposed is to just allow developers to experiment and start learning about the APIs at an early stage.

In order to enable the experimental APIs the --enable-experimental-apis flag needs to be provided when running the application that depends on this package, or alternatively, the enableExperimentalApis flag can be set to true in the initialisation options.

When any of the experimental APIs is called by an application, a warning message like the following will be logged in the console:

** Experimental API WARNING **
* The application is making use of a safe-node-app experimental API *
The '<function/feature name>' is part of a set of experimental functions.
Any/all of them may be deprecated, removed, or very likely change in the future.
Also regular users won't have this APIs enabled by default unless the flag is provided, so be aware of all these limitations.
For more information, updates, or to submit ideas and suggestions, please visit https://github.com/maidsafe/safe_app_nodejs

Further Help

You can discuss development-related questions on the SAFE Dev Forum. If you are just starting to develop an application for the SAFE Network, it's very advisable to visit the SAFE Network Dev Hub where you will find a lot of relevant information, including a tutorial to create an example SAFE desktop application which makes use of this package.

License

This SAFE Network library is dual-licensed under the Modified BSD (LICENSE-BSD https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause) or the MIT license (LICENSE-MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Copyrights in the SAFE Network are retained by their contributors. No copyright assignment is required to contribute to this project.