As documented in https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/issues/923#issuecomment-599300317 ,
- #923 is caused by installing placeholder app deps at nativefier
*install* time, with yarn (8.0.2) or npm (8.0.3). This is new in
Nativefier 8.x, for the motivations behind it, see
https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/pull/898#issuecomment-583865045
- During testing, I did test global installs, but never to a
system / non-user-writable path (my `$npm_config_prefix` is set to
`"$HOME/.node_modules"`)
- But without such a config and when installing globally to a
non-user-writable/system path with `sudo npm i -g nativefier`,
- Installation of nativefier core works...
- ... but then `postinstall` tries to do its job of installing
app deps, and fails in various OS-dependent ways, but all about
access rights.
I suspect that, although main nativefier install runs as `su` with
access rights to system paths, `postinstall` scripts are run *out*
of `su`.
That would make sense for security reasons: out of hook scripts,
npm knows exactly what will be touched in your filesystem: it's the
static contents of the published tarball; a postinstall script with
sudo rights could do nasty dynamic stuff. So, although I don't see
any mention of that in
[npm-scripts docs / hooks](https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scripts#hook-scripts)
and I haven't dug npm/cli's code, I can understand it.
So, reverting back to `webpack`ing the placeholder app, as done pre-8.0.
## Breaking changes
- Require **Node >= 8.10.0 and npm 5.6.0**
- Move to **Electron 8.1.1**.
- That's it. Lots of care went into breaking CLI & programmatic behavior
as little as possible. **Please report regressions**.
- Known issue: build may fail behind a proxy. Get in touch if you use one:
https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/issues/907#issuecomment-596144768
## Changes summary
Nativefier didn't get much love recently, to the point that it's
becoming hard to run on recent Node, due to old dependencies.
Also, some past practices now seem weird, as better expressible
by modern JS/TS, discouraging contributions including mine.
Addressing this, and one thing leading to another, came a
bigger-than-expected revamp, aiming at making Nativefier more
**lean, stable, future-proof, user-friendly and dev-friendly**,
while **not changing the CLI/programmatic interfaces**. Highlights:
- **Require Node>=8**, as imposed by many of our dependencies. Node 8
is twice LTS, and easily available even in conservative Linux distros.
No reason not to demand it.
- **Default to Electron 8**.
- **Bump** all dependencies to latest version, including electron-packager.
- **Move to TS**. TS is great. As of today, I see no reason not to use it,
and fight interface bugs at runtime rather than at compile time.
With that, get rid of everything Babel/Webpack.
- **Move away from Gulp**. Gulp's selling point is perf via streaming,
but for small builds like Nativefier, npm tasks are plenty good
and less dependency bloat. Gulp was the driver for this PR: broken
on Node 12, and I didn't feel like just upgrading and keeping it.
- Add tons of **verbose logs** everywhere it makes sense, to have a
fine & clear trace of the program flow. This will be helpful to
debug user-reported issues, and already helped me fix a few bugs.
- With better simple logging, get rid of the quirky and buggy
progress bar based on package `progress`. Nice logging (minimal
by default, the verbose logging mentioned above is only used
when passing `--verbose`) is better and one less dependency.
- **Dump `async` package**, a relic from old callback-hell early Node.
Also dump a few other micro-packages unnecessary now.
- A first pass of code **cleanup** thanks to modern JS/TS features:
fixes, simplifications, jsdoc type annotations to types, etc.
- **Remove GitHub integrations Hound & CodeClimate**, which are more
exotic than good'ol'linters, and whose signal-to-noise ratio is too low.
- Quality: **Add tests** and add **Windows + macOS CI builds**.
Also, add a **manual test script**, helping to quickly verify the
hard-to-programatically-test stuff before releases, and limit regressions.
- **Fix a very small number of existing bugs**. The goal of this PR was
*not* to fix bugs, but to get Nativefier in better shape to do so.
Bugfixes will come later. Still, these got addressed:
- Add common `Alt`+`Left`/`Right` for previous/next navigation.
- Improve #379: fix zoom with `Ctrl` + numpad `+`/`-`
- Fix pinch-to-zoom (see https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/issues/379#issuecomment-598612128 )
Adam Weeden
Ronan Jouchet