This file contains tips to help you take (and understand) your first steps in the world of Theia development. Are you in a hurry? See the Quick Start.
Theia is a framework to build IDEs, so you can't really "run" Theia itself. However, you can run the example applications included in its repository. One is a browser-based IDE and the other is the Electron-based equivalent.
The following instructions are for Linux and macOS.
For Windows instructions click here.
- Prerequisites
- Quick Start
- Clone the repository
- The repository structure
- Build core, extensions and examples packages
- Build extension packages individually
- Run the browser-based example application
- Run the Electron-based example application
- Rebuilding
- Watching
- Debugging
- Testing
- Code coverage
- Building on Windows
- Troubleshooting
- Node.js v8.0 or higher
- Yarn package manager v1.2.1
- git (If you would like to use the Git-extension too, you will need to have git version 2.11.0 or higher.)
nvm is recommended to easily switch between Node.js versions.
To build and run the browser example:
git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia \
&& cd theia \
&& yarn \
&& cd examples/browser \
&& yarn run start
Start your browser on http://localhost:3000.
To build and run the Electron example:
git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia \
&& cd theia \
&& yarn \
&& yarn run rebuild:electron \
&& cd examples/electron \
&& yarn run start
To run the browser example using SSL use:
git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia \
&& cd theia \
&& yarn \
&& cd examples/browser \
&& yarn run start --ssl --cert /path/to/cert.crt --certkey /path/to/certkey.key
Start your browser on https://localhost:3000.
git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia
The directory containing the Theia repository will now be referred to as
$THEIA
, so if you want to copy-paste the examples, you can set the THEIA
variable in your shell:
THEIA=$PWD/theia
Theia repository has multiple folders:
packages
folder contains runtime packages, as the core package and extensions to itdev-packages
folder contains devtime packages- @theia/cli is a command line tool to manage Theia applications
- @theia/ext-scripts is a command line tool to share scripts between Theia runtime packages
examples
folder contains example applications, both Electron-based and browser-baseddoc
folder provides documentation about how Theia worksscripts
folder contains JavaScript scripts used by npm scripts when installing- the root folder lists dev dependencies and wires everything together with Lerna
You can download dependencies and build it using:
cd $THEIA
yarn
This command downloads dev dependencies, links and builds all packages. To learn more and understand precisely what's going on, please look at scripts in package.json.
From the root:
npx run build @theia/package-name
From the package:
yarn --ignore-scripts && yarn build
We can start the application from the examples/browser directory with:
yarn run start
This command starts the backend application listening on port 3000
. The frontend application should be available on http://localhost:3000.
If you rebuild native Node.js packages for Electron then rollback these changes before starting the browser example by running from the root directory:
yarn run rebuild:browser
From the root directory run:
yarn run rebuild:electron
This command rebuilds native Node.js packages against the version of Node.js used by Electron.
It can also be started from the examples/electron directory with:
yarn run start
In the root directory run:
yarn run build
To rebuild each time a change is detected run:
yarn run watch
To rebuild each time a change is detected in frontend or backend you can run:
yarn run watch
You can use npx
to watch a single package:
npx run watch @theia/the-package-name
- In VS Code: start the debug tab and run the
Launch Backend
configuration.
- Start the backend by using
yarn run start
. - In a browser: Open http://localhost:3000/ and use the dev tools for debugging.
- In VS Code: start the debug tab and run the
Launch Frontend
configuration.
- In VS Code: Start the debug tab and run the
Launch Backend
configuration. - Then run the
Launch Frontend
configuration.
- In VS Code: Start the debug tab and run the
Launch Electron Backend
configuration.
- Start the backend by using
yarn run start
. - In Electron: Help -> Toggle Electron Developer Tools.
- Pass
--${server-name}-inspect
arg to the backend server.- For example
--nfsw-watcher-inspect=0
to inspect nfsw watcher processes with dynamic port allocation. - All variations of
--inspect
flag are supported: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/inspector/#command-line-options.
- For example
- Attach the debugger to the logged port.
In order to look up server-name
run the backend server with --logLevel=debug
flag to enable logging of IPC servers instantiation.
You should be able to see message of [${server-name}: ${server-PID}]: IPC started
format, like [nsfw-watcher: 37557] IPC started
.
See the testing documentation.
yarn run test
By default, this will generate the code coverage for the tests in an HTML
format, which can be easily viewed with your browser (Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari
etc.) by opening packages/<package name>/coverage/index.html
.
Run cmd.exe as an administrator and install choco
by copy-pasting the command
to your console:
@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
Install yarn
via choco
. The yarn
installation ensures that you will have
Node.js and npm too:
choco install yarn
Install git
via choco
choco install git
Install the correct version of yarn
(The version is important)
choco install yarn --version 1.2.1 -y
Install Windows-Build-Tools. Run PowerShell as an administrator and copy-paste the below command:
npm --add-python-to-path install --global --production windows-build-tools
Clone, build and run Theia. Using Git Bash as administrator:
git clone https://github.com/theia-ide/theia.git && cd theia && yarn && cd examples/browser && yarn run start
You might see error Could not open cafile: EISDIR: illegal operation on a directory
errors when running yarn
. This is a known issue in yarn
version 1.2.1
, and will be fixed in the next release. You can safely ignore it for now.
The start command will start a watcher on many files in the theia directory. To avoid ENOSPC errors, increase your default inotify watches.
It can be done like so:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p
Theia uses native modules and also requires Python 2.x to be installed on the system when building the application.
- One can get all the all-in-one packages by running
npm install --global windows-build-tools
script.
If you are facing with EPERM: operation not permitted
or permission denied
errors while building, testing or running the application then;
- You don't have write access to the installation directory.
- Try to run your command line (
PowerShell
,GitBash
,Cygwin
or whatever you are using) as an administrator. - The permissions in the NPM cache might get corrupted. Please try to run
npm cache clean
to fix them. - If you experience issues such as
Error: EBUSY: resource busy or locked, rename
, try to disable (or uninstall) your anti-malware software. See here. - Still having issues on Windows? File a bug. We are working on Linux or OS X operating systems. Hence we are more than happy to receive any Windows-related feedbacks, bug reports.
If you have accidentally installed the wrong yarn
version, you have to remove it, then reinstall it.
- Run PowerShell as an administrator.
- Run: choco uninstall yarn -y
- Run: choco install yarn --version 1.2.1 -y
You need to have the Xcode command line tools installed in order to build and run Theia. You can install the tools by running
xcode-select --install
If you already have Xcode installed, but you see the xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
error, you need to run the following command to fix it: sudo xcode-select --switch /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
.
When trying to install with root privileges, you might encounter errors such as
cannot run in wd
.
Several options are available to you:
- Install without root privileges
- Use the
--unsafe-perm
flag:yarn --unsafe-perm