boson

boson is a prototype GUI meant to expand and eventually replace STUI. It uses the following libraries and frameworks:

• Typescript for event management.
• electron for window management and packaging.
• React for building interfaces.
• Material UI for React components with a unified design.

Development

boson uses the Electron Forge boilerplate with the vite-typescript template. First, install the dependencies with yarn (use of npm may be possible but is not tested; please do not commit the package-lock.json file). Note that this workflow is tested with yarn 4.1.0+ and node 21 on macOS Sonoma. It may not work in other systems.

yarn install

You can run the application in development mode with

yarn start

To package the app for distribution do

yarn package

and to publish it to GitHub as a draft release, do

yarn publish

The packaging script will try to code sign and notarise your macOS binaries, for which you need to have set $APPLE_ID and $APPLE_ID_PASS to an email and app-specific password that can be used to notarize boson. In general you don't need to worry about notarising since the CI workflow will do it for you, but note that if you try to distribute a non-notarised app most users won't be able to run it without disabling Gatekeeper.

Continuous Integration

The GitHub workflow publish.yml will build and notarise the application (currently only macOS binaries are produced) in three circumstances:

• When a new tag is pushed.
• When the workflow is manually initiated as a workflow dispatch.

For new tags the workflow will create a new draft release and publish the artifacts there. The user needs to manually edit the release notes and publish the release, which will in turn trigger the auto uploader to download the new version.