Chouette Mail

The fastest and smallest mail client in the universe

Chouette mail is a mail client consisting in a backend written in rust and a front end in elm.

This is a work in progress, and for the moment, not many features.

Table of contents

• Building
  • Building the client
  • Building the server
    • Installating Rust
    • Setting up the database
    • Configuring the server
• Running Chouette Mail
• Developping

Building

The following sections explain how to build the client and the server. If you have any problem building anything, feel free to open an issue.

Client

You'll need to intall elm in order to be able to build the client.

We recommend that you install elm with nvm.

Once elm is installed, you should be able to run make client-dev in the root of the repository to build the client.

Server

Install Rust

You'll need to install rust-nightly in order to be able to build the server. We recommend that you install rust with rustup, so you can install rust nightly by running rustup toolchain add nightly.

You have three tways to build the server with nightly:

• you can simple run make server-dev at the root of the directory,
• if you feel more confortable with using cargo, you can go to the server directory, run rustup override set nightly, and then you'll be able to cargo build freely,
• or you can cargo +nightly build in the server directory.

Database setup

The server requires a postgresql database. The best way is to create a postgres user and a database for it. On most operating systems, you need to use the postgres user:

sudo su postgres

Once that's done, you can create a user like this:

createuser -W <username>

and then, create a database for the user:

createdb <dbname> -O <username>

You can then run

exit

to get back to your normal user.

Configuration

Once you've created the database, you can run the chouette-setup tool that will prompt help to configure the server:

cargo run --bin chouette-setup

It will help you use the right settings, and check that everything is correct.

The last thing that needs to be done is it initialize the database. For this, you will need diesel_cli. You can install it like so:

cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres

Once diesel_cli is installed, you will be able to initialize the database by running:

diesel migration run

Running

Once you've built and configured everything, you just go to the server directory, and you run cargo run or cargo +nightly run depending on whether you overrode the toolchain.

Developping

You can install elm-live and run make client-watch at the root of the repository. When a change will be made to the client, elm-live will rebuild the client, and it will serve a static server on port 7000. However, this is not what you want, you need to start the rust server by going in the server directory and running cargo build or cargo +nightly build, and test on localhost:8000.

The rust server will always serve the latest version of the static files, so you don't need to restart the rust server everytime if you only modified the client.