building-desktop-client-app.md

Building AFFiNE Desktop Client App

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Development
• Build
• CI

Prerequisites

Before you start building AFFiNE Desktop Client Application, please install Rust toolchain first.

Note that if you encounter any issues with installing Rust and crates, try following this guide (zh-CN) to set up alternative registries.

Development

To run AFFiNE Desktop Client Application locally, run the following commands:

# in repo root
yarn install
yarn dev

# in packages/frontend/native
yarn build

# in packages/frontend/electron
yarn dev

Now you should see the Electron app window popping up shortly.

Build

To build the desktop client application, run yarn make in packages/frontend/electron.

Note: you may want to comment out osxSign and osxNotarize in forge.config.js to avoid signing and notarizing the app.

Once the build is complete, you can find the paths to the binaries in the terminal output.

Finished 2 bundles at:
  › Artifacts available at: <affine-repo>/packages/frontend/electron/out/make

CI

Please refer to .github/workflows/release-desktop-app.yml for the CI workflow. It will:

• build the app for all supported platforms
• upload the artifacts to GitHub Actions