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Linux Development for Contributors

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Jason San Jose edited this page Jun 13, 2013 · 59 revisions

Introduction

Brackets officially supports Mac and Windows. However, we're working on adding Linux support with the help of our open source community. If you're an end user that just wants to try out Brackets on Linux, please be aware that many features are missing or partially implemented.

To be clear, if you are NOT an extension developer and NOT planning to contribute to brackets-shell, please visit (TBD landing page) to download an experimental build of Brackets. Please review the release notes for known issues.

Development Environment Setup

These instructions will download the Git repositories for brackets-shell and brackets, download required dependencies, compile the native shell, stage all the runtime files, then run Brackets.

  1. Create a top level folder to contain the Brackets git repositories
  2. In a terminal window, cd to the folder from the previous step and run the following command
wget -O - https://gist.github.com/jasonsanjose/5514813/raw/d4ed00adfaf5613a629e97a4f9123532e9938928/setup.sh | bash
  1. Respond to sudo password prompts when requested
  2. When complete, Brackets will launch from /path/to/brackets-shell/installer/linux/staging/Brackets with www source (brackets/src) copied to /path/to/brackets-shell/installer/linux/staging/www
  3. To setup for Brackets development, we would normally use /path/to/brackets/tools/setup_for_hacking.sh to redirect the Brackets binary at the brackets git repository. There's still some open issues there, so instead, just manually run the following
ln -s /path/to/brackets /path/to/brackets-shell/installer/linux/staging/dev

Tested Distributions

Contributors: If you are willing to test other Linux distributions please add your results here

Distribution Version Issues
Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit None
Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Manually replace brackets-shell/deps/cef/Release/libcef.so with the 64-bit binary from http://www.magpcss.net/cef_downloads/ and rebuild

User Stories

There are several user stories (feature work) to complete in brackets-shell before the Linux version reaches feature parity with Mac and Windows. These stories are listed below in priority order

User Story Status Affected Features Contact
Update CEF In Progress Everything Jason San Jose
Node Integration Not Started Live Preview HTML Highlighting, Extension Manager Install/Update/Remove Joel Brandt
Ubuntu Installer/Packaging Not Started Install experience
File API - delete, rename Not Started Project tree and File menu delete and rename commands
Native Menus Not Started Menus (HTML menus are an interim, but completely functional substitute)
Show in OS Not Started Project tree command to show the selected file in the native OS file viewer
Automated Builds Not Started Jason San Jose

Building brackets-shell

The setup script will automatically create /path/to/brackets-shell/Makefile. If you're only making changes to C++ code, just run make and the binaries will be in /path/to/brackets-shell/out/Release.

When adding new files or changing the build configuration, you'll need to make modifications to the GYP configuration files (either appshell.gyp.txt or common.gypi). After making changes, you'll need to generate a new Makefile. To do this, run:

gyp --depth .

Packaging Brackets

Currently, we do not have a way to create an Ubuntu package suitable for end users to install. In the meantime, we can assemble all the required files necessary to run Brackets with the following script:

# copy required brackets-shell and brackets files to /path/to/brackets-shell/installer/linux/staging
/path/to/brackets-shell > ./installer/linux/stage_for_packaging.sh

This staging folder can be zipped and distributed as a "portable" install that the runtime dependencies are addressed separately.

FAQ

  1. I found a bug, where do I file it? Here Brackets issues
  2. I want to help, but I don't have any C++ or GTK experience. How can I help? Start learning C++ and GTK! Otherwise, see the next question.
  3. I can't help on the native shell, but how else can I help? You can help fix issues (Linux-specific or not) in the www code located in the brackets repository.
  4. Why isn't Linux distribution X supported? We're currently focused on Ubuntu since Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is well tested there both in a development environment and in deployment. We're open to contributors helping us support more distributions.
  5. Why aren't the Grunt scripts updated for Linux? The CEF binaries for Linux use 7zip instead of the standard ZIP file format. Some work needs to be done in the Grunt scripts to support this.
  6. Why is NodeJS required for brackets-shell?
  7. How do I use a browser other than Google Chrome?
  8. What IDE or tools should I use to work on brackets-shell?
  9. I really want to use Brackets in my browser instead of the native shell. How do I do that?
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