Zulip Flutter (beta)

A Zulip client for Android and iOS, using Flutter.

This app is currently in beta. When it's ready, it will become the new official mobile Zulip client. To see what work is planned before that launch, see the milestones and the project board.

Using Zulip

To use Zulip on iOS or Android, install the official mobile Zulip client.

Getting started in developing this beta app

Setting up

Follow the Flutter installation guide for your platform of choice.
Switch to the latest version of Flutter by running flutter channel main and flutter upgrade (see Flutter version below).
Ensure Flutter is correctly configured by running flutter doctor.
Start the app with flutter run, or from your IDE.

Flutter help

For help getting started with Flutter development, view the online documentation, which offers tutorials, samples, guidance on mobile development, and a full API reference. Specific resources include:

Flutter version

While in the beta phase, we use the latest Flutter from Flutter's main branch. Use flutter channel main and flutter upgrade.

We don't pin a specific version, because Flutter itself doesn't offer a way to do so. So far that hasn't been a problem. When it becomes one, we'll figure it out; there are several tools for this in the Flutter community. See issue #15.

Tests

You can run all our forms of tests with the tools/check script:

$ tools/check

See tools/check --help for more information.

The two major test suites are the Dart analyzer, which performs type-checking and linting; and our unit tests, located in the test/ directory.

You can run these suites directly with the commands flutter analyze and flutter test respectively. Both commands accept a list of file or directory paths to operate on, and other options. Particularly recommended is a command like

$ flutter test test/foo/bar_test.dart --name 'baz'

which will run only the tests in test/foo/bar_test.dart, and within those only the tests with names matching baz.

When editing in an IDE, the IDE should give you the exact same feedback as flutter analyze would. When editing a test file, the IDE can also run individual tests for you. See upstream docs on flutter test.

Notes

Writing tests

For unit tests, we use the checks package. This is a new package from the Dart team, currently in preview, which is intended to replace the old matcher package.

This means that if you see example test code elsewhere that uses the expect function, we'd prefer to translate it into something in terms of check. For help with that, see the package:checks migration guide and the package's API docs.

Because package:checks is still in preview, the Dart team is open to feedback on the API to a degree that they won't be after it reaches 1.0. So where we find rough edges, now is a good time to report them as issues.

Editing API types

We support Zulip Server 4.0 and later. For API features added in newer versions, use TODO(server-N) comments (like those you see in the existing code.)

When editing the files in lib/api/model/, use the following command to keep the generated files up to date:

$ dart run build_runner watch --delete-conflicting-outputs

In our API types, constructors should generally avoid default values for their parameters, even null. This means writing e.g. required this.foo rather than just this.foo, even when foo is nullable. This is because it's common in the Zulip API for a null or missing value to be quite salient in meaning, and not a boring value appropriate for a default, so that it's best to ensure callers make an explicit choice. If passing explicit values in tests is cumbersome, a factory function in test/example_data.dart is an appropriate way to share defaults.

Upgrading Flutter

We regularly increment our lower bounds on Flutter and Dart versions, to make sure there's not too much divergence in the versions people are using.

When there's a new beta (which happens a couple of times per month), that's a good prompt to do this. We also do this when there's a new PR merged that we particularly want to take.

To update the version bounds:

Use flutter upgrade to upgrade your local Flutter and Dart.
Update the lower bounds at environment in pubspec.yaml to the new versions, as seen in flutter --version.
Run flutter pub get, which will update pubspec.lock.
Make a quick check that things work: tools/check, and do a quick smoke-test of the app.
Commit and push the changes in pubspec.yaml and pubspec.lock.

Upgrading dependencies

When adding or upgrading dependencies, try to keep our generated files updated atomically with them.

In particular the files ios/Podfile.lock and macos/Podfile.lock frequently need an update when dependencies change. To update those, run (on a Mac) the commands flutter build ios --config-only && flutter build macos --config-only.

(Ideally we would validate these automatically in CI: #329. Several other kinds of generated files are already validated in CI.)

Translations and i18n

When adding new strings in the UI, we set them up to be translated. For details on how to do this, see the translation doc.

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Kandra Labs, Inc., and contributors.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

The software includes some works released by third parties under other free and open source licenses. Those works are redistributed under the license terms under which the works were received.

License

sirpengi/zulip-flutter

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