appPackager

A script for creating packages of your appjs applications.

Quick Start Linux:

A debian package is available for linux: appjs-packager.deb

appjs-packager <project-dir>

This will create a folder under called deploy, if no package.json is found in the project directory then one will be created. The packager will then create .appjs containing the application and --.modpack.gz for each module.

appjs-packager <project-name>.appjs

will extract the contents of the packaged file to directory.

Quick Start Windows:

appPackager should be run by node and passed a parameter of the project directory to package:

node appPackager <project-dir>

appPackager will take the files in project-dir and create a project-dir.appjs package containing the files.

node appPackager <project-name>.appjs

appPackager will unpack all of the files in the project-dir.appjs package into data/content/ folder.

Use with AppJS

To see an example of how to use the application packages see this related project: https://github.com/sihorton/appjs-platform/

To use with vanilla AppJS save packagedApp.js to your data directory and then replace the following line in app.js:

app.serveFilesFrom(__dirname + '/content');

with

var packageRunner = require('./packagedApp.js');
app.router.use(packageRunner)(__dirname + '/package.appjs');

Copy the node_modules/adm-zip folder from the appPackager directory into your AppJS/data/node_modules/adm-zip folder.

Then run appjs as normal but now files will be served from the package.appjs file instead of the content/ folder.

Module Dependencies

In order to support applications that utilise node modules that are not in the vanilla appjs install the script scans the node_modules directory. For each module that it finds it creates a binary package file (.modpack) in the node_modules file for the platform that the script is run on.

When running a packaged application appjs can then access this dependency information and download

package.json and Dependancies

appPackager will read and update a package.json file in the project directory. Each time it is run it will add any new dependancies that were found in the node_modules directory. The file is a simple json text file that you can edit and add any additional properties you like.

An example of the file is given below:

{
	"name": "new-example",
	"version": 0.1,
	"moduleUrl": "http://example.com/modulePackages/",
	"appUpdateUrl": "http://example.com/new-example/latest.txt",
	"moddeps": {
		"adm-zip": {
			"name": "adm-zip",
			"version": "0.1.5",
			"platforms": {
				"win32": "win32"
			}
		},
		"appjs": {
			"name": "appjs",
			"version": "0.0.19",
			"platforms": {
				"win32": "win32"
			}
		},
		"appjs-win32": {
			"name": "appjs-win32",
			"version": "0.0.19",
			"platforms": {
				"win32": "win32"
			}
		},
		"iconv": {
			"name": "iconv",
			"version": "1.2.3",
			"platforms": {
				"win32": "win32"
			}
		},
		"mime": {
			"name": "mime",
			"version": "1.2.5",
			"platforms": {
				"win32": "win32"
			}
		}
	}
}

Routers

packagedApp.js contains a new router that can be used to serve files from a package instead of a directory. The router yields if it cannot find a matching file enabling you to serve files from a package and a directory:

app.serveFilesFrom(__dirname + '/content');
app.router.use(require('./packagedApp.js')(__dirname + '/package.appjs'));

The code above will serve files from the package.appjs unless there is a matching file in the content directory in which case the content directory file will be used instead.

Cross platform

appPackager is written in javascript so is fully cross platform.

Security / Goals

The packaging of the application does not add any security at all. It is easy to extract all of the contents of the packaged application. The goal for this project is to make it easy to take an application on my local disk, bundle it up and then distribute it cross platform to other users. Doing this saves you having to distribute a 20 meg+ runtime along with your app for each platform you can run on. It also provides a good solution for node_modules dependancies.