Backchat

A hackable IRC app for Mac OS X. Written in HTML and JavaScript, and run inside an Electron (previously atom-shell) wrapper.

Developer set-up

To run the app using the Electron bootstrapper:

npm install
./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild
npm start

electron-rebuild must be run after you install or update packages, to ensure packages are compiled for an electron-compatible version of Node. (If you get errors like Module version mismatch. Expected 44, got 14. it’s because you’ve not run electron-rebuild.)

npm start automatically compiles the Sass stylesheets, checks the JavaScript files for syntax errors, and—if both of those things passed successfully—starts Backchat in the Electron bootstrapper.

Compiling into a Mac app

npm run build

Running the tests

There are very limited integration tests. They use selenium-webdriver and chromedriver, along with mocha as a test runner – all of which are included as dev dependencies in package.json.

To run the tests:

npm install
npm test

Since the tests must be run on a compiled version of the Electron app, npm test first builds the app, and then runs the tests on it. Just like npm run build, it checks for javascript syntax errors before compiling.

While running mocha, npm test sets the BACKCHAT_DEBUG environment variable, which causes server/main.js to load test fixtures rather than real user data, and to output more detailed console logs.