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This file contains tips to help you take (and understand) your first steps in the world of Theia development. Are you in a hurry? See the tl;dr.

How to build Theia and the example applications

Theia is a framework to build IDEs, so you can't really "run" Theia itself. However, you can run the example applications included in its repository. One is a browser-based IDE and the other is the electron-based equivalent.

Prerequisites

So far it has been confirmed that there are some problems and errors using nodejs 8.0+ with Theia. As of now, nodejs 7.10.0 is confirmed to be working well and is the currently recommended versions.

nvm is recommended to easily switch between node versions.

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia

The directory containing the Theia repository will now be referred to as $THEIA, so if you want to copy-paste the examples, you can set the THEIA variable in your shell:

THEIA=$PWD/theia

Build core, extensions and examples packages

You can download dependencies and build it using:

cd $THEIA
yarn

This command does a few things:

  • downloads node package dependencies
  • generate package.json for node packages
  • link core, extensions and examples packages
  • build core, extensions and examples packages

Run the browser-based example application

We can start the application from the examples/browser directory with:

yarn run start

This command starts the backend application, a small web server and a browser tab with the frontend.

If you rebuild native node packages for electron then rollback these changes before starting the browser example by running from the root directory:

yarn run rebuild:browser

Run the electron-based example application

From the root directory run:

yarn run rebuild:electron

This command rebuilds native node packages against the version of node used by electron.

It can also be started from the examples/electron directory with:

yarn run start

Rebuilding

In the root directory run:

yarn run build

Watching

core and extension packages

To rebuild each time a change is detected run:

yarn run watch

the examples

To rebuild each time a change is detected in frontend or backend you can run:

yarn run watch

Debugging

To debug an example using VSCode:

Debug the browser example's backend

  • Start the debug tab and run the Launch Backend configuration.

Debug the browser example's frontend

  • Start the frontend using yarn run start:frontend
  • In a browser: open http://localhost:8080/ and use the dev tools for debugging
  • In VS Code: start the debug tab and run the Launch Frontend configuration.

Debug the browser example's frontend and backend at the same time

  • create a symlink to theia directory ln -s theia theia-frontend
  • Open one vscode in theia directory.
  • Open another vscode in theia-frontend directory.
  • In one vscode window: start the debug tab and run the Launch Backend configuration.
  • In the other vscode window: start the debug tab and run the Launch Frontend configuration.

Debug the electron example

This one you can build as usual with yarn run build and then use Chrome's dev tools to debug.

There's an issue debugging with vscode it seems electron runs at 100% and debugging doesn't work.

Issues

Note that we should be able to debug both frontend and backend in one window but I've this this issue when trying that. tl;dr Some breakpoints don't hit.

tl;dr

To build and run the browser example:

git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia \
&& cd theia \
&& yarn --unsafe-perm \
&& cd examples/browser \
&& yarn run start

To build and run the electron example:

git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia \
&& cd theia \
&& yarn --unsafe-perm \
&& yarn run rebuild:electron \
&& cd examples/electron \
&& yarn run start

Code coverage

yarn run test

If you would like to check the generated code coverage report

firefox coverage/index.html

Troubleshooting

Linux

The start command will start a watcher on many files in the theia directory. To avoid ENOSPC errors, increase your default inotify watches.

It can be done like so:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Windows

Theia uses native modules and also requires Python 2.x to be installed on the system when building the application.

  • One can get all the all-in-one packages by running npm install --global windows-build-tools script.

If you are facing with EPERM: operation not permitted or permission denied errors while building, testing or running the application then;

  • You don't have write access to the installation directory.
  • Try to run your command line (PowerShell, GitBash, Cygwin or whatever you are using) as an administrator.
  • The permissions in the NPM cache might get corrupted. Please try to run npm cache clean to fix them.
  • If you experience issues such as Error: EBUSY: resource busy or locked, rename, try to disable (or uninstall) your anti-malware software. See here.
  • Still having issues on Windows? File a bug. We are working on Linux or OS X operating systems. Hence we are more than happy to receive any Windows related feedbacks, bug reports.