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Holochain Kangaroo

Put your Holochain App in this Kangaroo's tauri pouch and let it run around.

This repository let's you easily convert your Holochain app into a standalone tauri-based cross-platform Desktop app.

Holochain Version: The Kangaroo currently comes with Holochain holochain-v0.2.7-rc.1.

Note: Support for non-breaking updates to happ coordinator zomes is currently not built into the kangaroo.

Instructions

  1. Install Rust and Go (Go is required for Holochain version 0.2.X). Then follow the Tauri Prerequisites instructions for your platform.

  2. Either use this repository as a template (by clicking on the green "Use this template" button) or fork it.
    Using it as a template allows you to start with a clean git history and the contributors of this repository won't show up as contributors to your new repository. Forking has the advantage of being able to relatively easily pull in updates from this parent repository at a later stage.

  3. After cloning the newly created repository, run npm install to install the relevant tauri dependencies.

  4. Compile the holochain and lair-keystore binaries if you intend to build your app locally. On macOS/Linux you can run bash setup/install_binaries.sh to do that automatically. On Windows, follow this guide.

  5. Add your [your-project].happ file and a ui.zip file containing your UI assets to the ./pouch folder. If you scaffolded your app using the scaffolding tool, the npm run package command will have created the .happ file as well as a dist.zip file for you. In that case you can use said dist.zip file and rename it to ui.zip.

  6. Search the repository for replace-me and replace it with your project's name or follow the instructions in the comments if provided. Note: The productName in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json must not contain any dots or parentheses (and likely other special characters).

  7. Add your app's icon: If you have an icon for your app, make sure to have it as a 1024x1024 pixel .png format and run npm run tauri icon [path-to-your-1024x1024-png] (https://tauri.app/v1/guides/features/icons). This will generate all the necessary icons and store it in src-tauri/icons

  8. Set all the version numbers in package.json, src-tauri/Cargo.toml and src-tauri/tauri.conf.json. The verison number in src-tauri/Cargo.toml is part of the filesystem storage logic, read the note on versioning

  9. Build the app locally by running npm run kangaroo

Publish cross-platform Binaries

To publish cross-platform binaries (not code-signed), follow these steps:

  1. Create a new branch release: git checkout -b release.

  2. Push the new branch to github to trigger the release workflow.

For further releases:

  1. Update the version number of your app in all relevant places.

  2. Merge your changes from main into release

  3. Push to github to trigger the release workflow.

Code-signed cross-platform Binaries

The .github/workflows/release-codesigned.yaml contains a template workflow for binaries with macOS as well as Windows EV Certificate code signing. The workflow gets triggered when publishing on branch release-codesigned.

The macOS code signing is based on tauri's instructions here.

The Windows code signing with EV cert is based on these instructions and uses a slightly modified fork of tauri's github actions.

For the Windows part or if you want to only do macOS code signing, follow the instructions in the comments in release-codesigned.yaml (search for the keyword HELP).

If you want to sign your Windows binaries with an OV certificate instead of an EV certificate, follow tauri's instructions.

Auto-Updating of your App

To add automatic updates to your app, you may follow the instructions here. An empty updater.json template file is part of this repository.

Some important notes:

  • The Holochain Kangaroo stores data on the filesystem according to semantic versioning. See Note on versioning

  • If you bump your Holochain and/or lair keystore version, you need to consider whether it remains compatible with the existing Holochain conductor / lair keystore.

As a consequence, be careful not to trigger automatic updates on your end-users if your app is a breaking change due to one of the above mentioned scenarios.

Note on Versioning

The Holochain Kangaroo stores data on the filesystem according to semantic versioning, for which it considers the app version specified in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json. This has implications on your choice of the version number.

Example:
Binaries built with app versions 0.0.2 and 0.0.3 will store their data in separate subfolder on the filesystem and will have independent Holochain conductors. From end-user perspective this is a breaking change and opening a 0.0.3 version of your app won't provide access to data stored with the 0.0.2 version of your app.

Binaries built with app versions 0.3.2 and 0.3.4 will share the same subfolder `0.3.x` on the filesystem and will share the same Holochain conductor.

Binaries built with app versions 2.0.5 and 2.3.4 will share the same subfolder `2.x.x` on the filesystem and will share the same Holochain conductor.

Pre-releases are always stored in independent subfolders (0.1.0-alpha.1 is considered incompatible with 0.1.0-alpha.2)

Troubleshooting

  • If you get the error Error failed to bundle project: Failed to build data folders and files when running npm run tauri build, a likely reason is that your productName in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json contains invalid characters, such as dots (.)

  • If building the app fails with errors like Error: No artifacts were found. or Error failed to bundle project: error running light.exe the reason may again be that the productName in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json contains invalid characters such as parentheses (( or )) or possibly other unsupported special characters.

Recommended IDE Setup