Development

Any contribution is welcomed! There are no real formal contribution guidelines right now, they will maybe come later.

Repository Structure

The following for modules make up the X-Pipe API and a licensed under the MIT license:

core - Shared core classes of the X-Pipe Java API, X-Pipe extensions, and the X-Pipe daemon implementation
beacon - The X-Pipe beacon component is responsible for handling all communications between the X-Pipe daemon and the client applications, for example the various programming language APIs and the CLI

The other modules make up the X-Pipe implementation and are licensed under GPL:

app - Contains the X-Pipe daemon implementation, the X-Pipe desktop application, and an API to create all different kinds of extensions for the X-Pipe platform
dist - Tools to create a distributable package of X-Pipe
ext - Available X-Pipe extensions. Essentially every feature is implemented as an extension

Open source model

X-Pipe utilizes an open core model, which essentially means that the main application is open source while certain other components are not. Select parts are not open source yet, but may be added to this repository in the future. Some tests and especially test environments and that run on private servers are also not included in this repository (Don't want to leak server information). Finally, scripts and workflows to create and publish installers and packages are also not included to prevent attackers from easily impersonating the X-Pipe application.

Modularity

All X-Pipe components target JDK 19 and make full use of the Java Module System (JPMS). All components are modularized, including all their dependencies. In case a dependency is (sadly) not modularized yet, module information is manually added using moditect. Further, note that as this is a pretty complicated Java project that fully utilizes modularity, many IDEs still have problems building this project properly. For example, you can't build this project in eclipse or vscode as it will complain about missing modules. The tested and recommended IDE is IntelliJ.

Setup

You need to have an up-to-date version of X-Pipe installed on your local system in order to properly run X-Pipe in a development environment. This is due to the fact that some components are only included in the release version and not in this repository. X-Pipe is able to automatically detect your local installation and fetch the required components from it when it is run in a development environment.

Building and Running

You can use the gradle wrapper to build and run the project:

gradlew app:run will run the desktop application. You can set various useful properties in app/build.gradle
gradlew dist will create a distributable production version in dist/build/dist/base.
gradlew <project>:test will run the tests of the specified project.

You are also able to properly debug the built production application through two different methods:

The app/scripts/xpiped_debug script will launch the application in debug mode and with a console attached to it
The app/scripts/xpiped_debug_attach script attaches a debugger with the help of AttachMe. Just make sure that the attachme process is running within IntelliJ, and the debugger should launch automatically once you start up the application.

Note that when any unit test is run using a debugger, the X-Pipe daemon process that is started will also attempt to connect to that debugger through AttachMe as well.

FAQ

Why are there no GitHub actions workflows in this repository?

There are several test workflows run in a private environment as they use private test connections such as remote server connections and database connections. Other private workflows are responsible for packaging, signing, and distributing the releases. So you can assume that the code is tested!

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