joplin/BUILD.md

General information

• All the applications share the same library, which, for historical reasons, is in ReactNativeClient/lib. This library is copied to the relevant directories when building each app.
• The translations are built by running CliClient/build-translation.sh. You normally don't need to run this if you haven't updated the translation since the compiled files are on the repository.

macOS dependencies

brew install yarn node
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/gettext/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

Linux and Windows (WSL) dependencies

• Install yarn - https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/
• Install node v8.x (check with node --version) - https://nodejs.org/en/
• If you get a node-gyp related error you might need to manually install it: npm install -g node-gyp

Building the tools

Before building any of the applications, you need to build the tools:

cd Tools
npm install

Building the Electron application

cd ElectronClient/app
rsync --delete -a ../../ReactNativeClient/lib/ lib/
npm install
yarn dist

If there's an error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory, run sudo apt-get install libgconf-2-4

If you get a node-gyp related error you might need to manually install it: npm install -g node-gyp.

If you get the error libtool: unrecognized option '-static', follow the instructions in this post to use the correct libtool version.

That will create the executable file in the dist directory.

From /ElectronClient you can also run run.sh to run the app for testing.

Building Electron application on Windows

cd Tools
npm install
cd ..\ElectronClient\app
xcopy /C /I /H /R /Y /S ..\..\ReactNativeClient\lib lib
npm install
yarn dist

If node-gyp does not works (MSBUILD: error MSB3428: Could not load the Visual C++ component "VCBuild.exe"), you might need to install the windows-build-tools using npm install --global windows-build-tools.

If yarn dist fails, it may need administrative rights.

The building_win32_tips on this page might be helpful.

Building the Mobile application

First you need to setup React Native to build projects with native code. For this, follow the instructions on the Get Started tutorial, in the "Building Projects with Native Code" tab.

Then, from /ReactNativeClient, run npm install, then react-native run-ios or react-native run-android.

Building the Terminal application

cd CliClient
npm install
./build.sh
rsync --delete -aP ../ReactNativeClient/locales/ build/locales/

Run run.sh to start the application for testing.