status-mobile/doc/starting-guide.md

Description

This document provides information on how to start developing Status App.

Getting Started

To start developing start a shell for the platform you are interested in.

make shell TARGET=android

This step will take a while the first time as it will download all dependencies.

Development

There are three steps necessary to start development, in this case for Android:

1. make run-clojure - Compiles Clojure into JavaScript, watches for changes on cljs files, and hot-reloads code in the app.
2. make run-metro - Starts metro bundler and watches JavaScript code.
3. make run-android or make run-ios - Builds the Android/iOS app and starts it on the device.

The first two will continue watching for changes and keep re-building the app. They need to be ready first. The last one will exit once the app is up and ready.

Simulators and Devices

Android

You need to have an emulator like AVD, or Genymotion, or a real device running and visible to adb, before you run make run-android.

iOS

Running on a simulator

We highly recommend using the iPhone 11 Pro simulator as its screen dimensions match with our design.

If you have Xcode v12.x (and above) installed in your system, you need to follow the below steps to add iPhone 11 Pro simulator:

1. Open Xcode
2. Menu > Window > Devices and Simulators
3. Tap + button on bottom left
4. Select Device Type as iPhone 11 Pro
5. Leave the Simulator Name empty and tap on Create

NOTE ⚠️

Running make run-ios will target iPhone 11 Pro by default.

If you need to run on any other simulator, you can specify the simulator type by adding the SIMULATOR flag:

make run-ios SIMULATOR="iPhone 11 Pro"

Running on a physical device

Some manual steps are necessary for developing on a physical iOS Device.

Build release

To build the app, you can simply run on of the following:

make release-android
make release-ios

For more make targets run make help.

Updating Dependencies

• make nix-update-pods - iOS CocoaPods dependencies (updates ios/Podfile and ios/Podfile.loc)
• make nix-update-gradle - Android Gradle/Maven dependencies (updates nix/deps/gradle/deps.json)
• make nix-update-clojure - Clojure Maven dependencies (updates nix/deps/clojure/deps.json)
• make nix-update-gems - Fastlane Ruby dependencies (updates fastlane/Gemfile.lock and fastlane/gemset.nix)

Manual Steps

There are a few manual steps you might want to do in order to start contributing.

Genymotion Virtualization

Optionally set up Genymotion if you don't want to use Android Virtual Device:

https://www.genymotion.com

Android Development Environment

You can also setup Android Development Environment + Simulator:

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html

Configure GitHub Account

The optimal way of pushing to GitHub is using SSH instead of user/pass auth.

It's recommended that you add your public SSH key to your GitHub account.

Configure GPG Keys for signing commits

In order to increase security we require all commits in status-mobile repo to be signed with a GPG key.

Steps:

1. Generate a new GPG key
2. Setup Git to use your GPG key
3. Setup Git to sign commits
4. Setup GitHub to validate commits

Physical iOS Device

To use a physical iPhone your device UDID must be added to provisioning profiles and your Apple account invited as Developer to Status team.

1. Get your UDID of your iPhone.
2. Request from someone with access like @cammellos or @jakubgs to

• Add the UDID to development devices on Apple Developer Portal.
• Invite your Apple account to be Developer in Status team.

3. Run a build in XCode using the project from status-mobile/ios directory.

• You might see error: Select a development team in the Signing & Capabilities editor
• Select Status Research & Development GmbH as the development team and rebuild again.

Once build finishes Status should start on your iPhone with its logs in terminal running make run-metro.