Documentation refresh for the world of electron

[scottnonnenberg]

The world has changed - Yarn, Electron, and build tools, oh my! Also, I think we can better order CONTRIBUTING.md to reflect how often various parts will be needed.

The best way to review this is to look at the resultant markdown. :0)

[liliakai]

pack prod should be pack-prod, but actually I think if we add "postinstall": "electron-builder install-app-deps" to our package.json scripts, we can drop this step because yarn install will then call electron-builder to rebuild dependencies, and it's faster than running the whole packaging process. 🎉

[scottnonnenberg]

Awesome. When looking at the command-line options, I was distracted by the node-gyp-rebuild option, which didn't work for me.

[liliakai]

I wouldn't encourage people to develop against production servers.

[liliakai]

This has got me thinking about ways to make it easier to develop on staging. Why is it hard?

1. You probably don't have a staging master device, so you have to go standalone
2. Standalone clients don't have any contacts
3. It's laborious to build up a complex/realistic message history for testing anything

Here's an alternate setup procedure that might make it a bit easier. Assuming you already have a linked/synced production install of Signal desktop, first, clone your production data directory to your development data directory:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal-development
cp -R ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal-development
yarn start

The app should start up looking just like your production install, but prompting you to re-link, because your prod credentials are no good on staging.

Click 'Relink', then 'Standalone', then 'Send SMS' (your number should be pre-filled, but editable).

Enter the confirmation code sent to your phone, and boom! You are registered as a standalone staging device with your normal phone number, and a copy of your production message history and contact list. Any further modifications made will be limited to the development environment, so it's generally much safer than testing against production.