Executables built with "gulp build" fail due to packaging

[milleniumbug]

Packaging seems to put all the scripts, resources inside resources/app.asar, but inside Language.ts we're manually opening a file, resulting in "File not found" errors, and the application showing a blank screen.

One workaround is manually copying the lang directory to the target, but this is ugly, adds a manual step, and doesn't work well with other targets than "dir"

[ChiriVulpes]

Afaik this is supposed to just work, not entirely sure what's breaking here but it's probably something to do with paths stuff in whatever creates the BrowserWindow instance

[milleniumbug]

Changing from

const fallbackResponse = await FileSystem.readFile("./lang/en-US.quilt", "utf8");

to

const fallbackResponse = await FileSystem.readFile("./resources/app.asar/lang/en-US.quilt", "utf8");

makes it work, but again, it's a hack.

One thing I've noticed is that this is the only "application internal" file we're trying to load with FileSystem.readFile - everything else is either a.) user data read with FileSystem.readFile which doesn't have any problem as we use absolute paths, b.) user config loaded/stored with whatever magic Electron is using, which is good enough as it stores the config in OS-specific user directory, c.) internal assets loaded "implicitly" with this:

    mainWindow.loadURL("data:text/html;charset=UTF-8," + encodeURIComponent(`
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="style/index.css">
        <script>
            const { webFrame } = require("electron");
            webFrame.setVisualZoomLevelLimits(1, 1);
            webFrame.setLayoutZoomLevelLimits(0, 0);

            window.Stream = require("@wayward/goodstream").default;
            require("@wayward/goodstream/apply");

            window.nodeRequire = require;
            delete window.require;
            delete window.exports;
            delete window.module;
        </script>
        <script src="script/vendor/require.js"></script>
        <script>
            requirejs(["script/init/Decorator.js"], () => {
                requirejs(["script/index.js"]);
            });
        </script>
    `), { baseURLForDataURL: `chiri://${__dirname}/out`, extraHeaders: "pragma: no-cache\n" });

The __dirname part I can log easily and see what it is, but I have completely no idea what is going on with that /out - There is no directory at chiri://${__dirname}/out, and yet, it works.

[ChiriVulpes]

Is this still broken btw? This might have been fixed recently

[milleniumbug]

I think it still is, gonna check out after work.

npx gulp build is how I try running it btw.

[milleniumbug]

Building from scratch on Windows (so to eliminate of possibility of Linux-specific problems you don't have)

Your environment has been set up for using Node.js 16.15.1 (x64) and npm.

I made an experiment on how I can modify the content of win-unpacked so it runs. So basically, two things:

• copying lang in the directory to the root directory, together with locales and resources
• unpacking app.asar to a directory, removing app.asar and renaming the new directory to app.asar, and then copying node_modules from out directory, which seems to be missing in the dist.

Conclusion: the problem still appears, in addition to a new one.

[ChiriVulpes]

Try now (on linux, I can confirm it works on windows)

[milleniumbug]

Can confirm that I can build a Windows executable from Linux, so that's good.