Get SQLite (native modules) working in extensions

paranext / paranext-core

Electron client, extension host, and C# library for Paranext

https://paranext.github.io/paranext-core/

MIT License

16 stars 2 forks source link

Get SQLite (native modules) working in extensions #1028

Closed tjcouch-sil closed 2 weeks ago

tjcouch-sil commented 1 month ago

User Story As an extension developer, I want to be able to run native modules from Node so that I can develop complex software with superpowers.

Description Biblica wants to bring an alignment tool into P.B. They are using SQLite. We need to support native modules like SQLite in some way to get this working. We need to do some digging.

tjcouch-sil commented 1 month ago

sqlite3 - npm [node.js] How to use native modules in NW.js | Using Sqlite3 | Ryusei.IO node.js - How to use sqlite3 module with electron? - Stack Overflow node.js - Electron crashes when requiring sqlite3 native module in forked process - Stack Overflow electron/rebuild: Package to rebuild native Node.js modules against the currently installed Electron version electron/forge: :electron: A complete tool for building and publishing Electron applications Native Node Modules | Electron

tjcouch-sil commented 1 month ago

Investigate for 1-3 days and figure out how much it will take to do this. Make a plan for making this work.

lyonsil commented 1 month ago

A few high-level thoughts:

It seems like this is probably the first "real" use case we have for extensions in other processes. Perhaps there is still a required manifest.json that points to TS code to launch another process during activate. If we provide another elevated privilege that allows us to spawn/fork the process for the extension, then we can automatically kill the other process when our process is shutting down.
We're probably going to need separate builds for Linux, macOS, and Windows. If so, we might want to make adjustments to the marketplace for this to work seamlessly by listing what OS is supported by a particular extension ZIP. If this could be a packaged extension, maybe this would impact the new build scripts, too.

tjcouch-sil commented 1 month ago

Potentially investigate how VS Code handles native deps or LSP processes or whatever regarding cross-platform builds

lyonsil commented 2 weeks ago

Some examples of VSCode extensions I looked into:

alexcvzz.vscode-sqlite installs Linux, OSX, and Windows binaries all the time on all OSes.
ms-mssql.mssql had OS-specific packages for years until the most recent release which appears to do some sort of all JS implementation that is OS agnostic (I would have to dig deeper to understand how this works, but it seems a little wild)
ms-python.python has OS-specific builds and only installs the right one for your OS
idered.npm was created explicitly to install npm packages on your dev box

lyonsil commented 2 weeks ago

The PR that is posted allows extensions to start other processes using the createProcess elevated privilege in manifest.json. If someone builds executables and packages them in the extension ZIP file, then they can start processes using those binaries. The elevated privilege details include what operating system you're running on so you can start the appropriate binary.