mortar-devtools/README.md

mortar+devtools

One project to build them all, and in the darkness distribute and bind them to your devtools.

Now seriously. This is a project to build the template + metadata files we upload to a CDN so that Firefox DevTools' WebIDE can present a nice list of templates for you to kick start your app.

I'm in! How to?

git clone https://github.com/sole/mortar-devtools.git --recursive
cd mortar-devtools
npm install # make sure all dependencies are installed
node build.js

This generates a dist folder with the content that WebIDE will present when you click "New App". But this has to be uploaded somewhere.

To upload to a server, ensure you have a config file with the proper settings in place. A sample config.local.json file that you can use as a base is provided:

cp config.local.json config.json

Edit it to suit your needs and then you can run the script that automatically uploads things to the server:

node upload.js

The provided script assumes that you have uploaded a public key to the other server and that you can use SCP so it's a very specific example. You can also upload the entire contents of the folder with any other method (e.g. with an SFTP/S3 client).

We upload it to a CDN for production, but to test with your own server you can change the URL that WebIDE pulls the JSON file with templates info from. Go to about:config and edit devtools.webide.templatesURL to point to the URL of the JSON file in your server.

Directory structure in templates/

For each template we want to include, we'll create a directory under templates.

Then add a git submodule for the template in a src subdirectory. For example, this is how you would add the app-stub template:

cd mortar-devtools/templates
mkdir app-stub
cd app-stub
git submodule add https://github.com/mozilla/mortar-app-stub.git src

An icon for the template is required too (this will be shown in the App Manager when listing the available templates). Icon format is PNG.

Pending stuff

• Generate JSON for devtools
  • Where does the data for each entry come from? title, description
    • Each template folder?
• Probably refactor common functions that will arise as more templates are added
• Things to test
  • For each template in templates/ there must be a generated ZIP file
  • Each ZIP must contain a valid project
    • how can we say something is "a valid project"?
      • It can be unzipped and has > 0 files
      • MD5?
• How do we get this into a public server?
  • check in the dist files
  • or make a task to upload to some FTP
    • then also need the MD5