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Hacking guide

Running style checks and unit tests

When working on the code base, consider running the style checks and unit tests locally, because the CI will complain anyway:

./gradlew briar-desktop:check

The above command does both. To run style checks only:

./gradlew ktlintCheck

If that fails, try formatting:

./gradlew ktlintFormat

Running unit tests only:

./gradlew briar-desktop:test --tests "*"

That will run tests from the desktop project only. On the other hand, this will also run tests on briar core:

./gradlew test

Testing different locales

You can simply switch the language in the settings screen of the application.

To test the app with a different default locale, add this e.g. in Main.kt:

Locale.setDefault(Locale("ar"))

and replace ar with a different language you would like to test, such as Arabic in this example.

It is also possible to run from the command line using Gradle with a different default language setting:

GRADLE_OPTS="-Duser.language=fr -Duser.country=FR" ./gradlew run

Threading

Some rules about threading in Briar Desktop:

  • Always use local variables instead of the composable State objects inside another thread: Source

Testing with multiple app instances

When experimenting with multiple app instances, it can make sense to decrease the polling time in briar core so that adding contacts succeeds quicker. In RendezvousConstants, change long POLLING_INTERVAL_MS = MINUTES.toMillis(1); to something lower such as long POLLING_INTERVAL_MS = SECONDS.toMillis(10);.

Updating Copyright headers

In IntelliJ, right click the root of the project tree and select "Update Copyright". In the dialog choose "Custom scope" and select "briar-desktop" and confirm "OK".

This applies the copyright profile configured in Settings → Editor → Copyright → Copyright Profiles in the scope which is configured in Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Scopes.

Which copyright profile is applied in which scope can be configured in Settings → Editor → Copyright.

Importing Android vector drawables

There's lots of icons already existing in the Android app. Those can be imported using vec2compose.

Unencrypted settings

We're currently using the Java Preferences API for storing unencrypted settings. This stores some UI preferences that are required before the database has been decrypted such as the UI language, light/dark theme and a custom scale factor for the whole UI. This API stores our preferences in an OS-specific manner. On Linux they're stored in flat XML files, on macOS they're stored in a proprietary format and on Windows they're probably stored in the registry.

On Linux the settings are stored in an XML file at ~/.java/.userPrefs/org/briarproject/briar/desktop/settings/prefs.xml and can be edited with a simple text editor. On other platforms inspecting and editing those preferences is not as straightforward. There is however a platform-independent UI tool called JPUI that allows you to inspect and edit them easily. Last release is from 2004, but it still works ;)

There's a setting for UI previews in a separate settings node (~/.java/.userPrefs/org/briarproject/briar/desktop/utils/prefs.xml on Linux). In order to scale UI previews up on high-density devices, run org.briarproject.briar.desktop.SetPreviewUtilsDensity from the test sources once with a custom UI scale value that works on your machine. That will persist the UI scale in the settings node so that all previews are scaled using that factor from then on.