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Linux Testing and You
GitHub Desktop doesn't currently support Linux in an official capacity, but many in the community have already been experimenting and testing it on their preferred distributions.
This document outlines the process to help provide a set of quality installers, based on community feedback and contributions.
Goals
The goals for this testing process are:
- test installers and Desktop on a variety of distributions
- report issues and provide feedback - either about running Desktop or the installer
- triage and address feedback whenever contributors have bandwidth
Testing Release Candidates
Release Candidate installers can be found on @shiftkey's fork, listed under the Releases tab. The current installer formats supported are Debian, RPM and AppImage.
@shiftkey aims to make new installers available soon after the main Desktop project tags and publishes a new update. To receive notifications when new installers are published, subscribe to @shiftkey's fork of the repository.
Subscribing to notifications also helps the core team to identify how many people are actively interested in this testing process.
Providing Feedback
If you find an issue with running the installer or Desktop on your platform, please open an issue on shiftkey/desktop. Do not open issues against the main repository - these issues will be closed with a note to report the issue to the right repository.
The issue template asks for details about your setup and how to reproduce the issue - please fill this out, as it will help with understanding and reproducing the issue.
Feel free to submit other questions or suggestions to shiftkey/desktop - this will give us a place to discuss things in more detail than the original thread about Linux support.
Contributing Fixes
If you are interested in testing installers locally, first ensure your development environment is setup to build and test Desktop.
Once your environment is setup, you can create an installer locally by running:
$ yarn
$ yarn build:prod
$ yarn run package
If you think you've found a solution, please submit a pull request to shiftkey/desktop explaining the change and what it fixes. If you're not quite sure, open an issue on the shiftkey/desktop fork explaining what you've found and where you think the problem lies. Maybe someone else has insight into the issue.
@shiftkey will co-ordinate upstreaming merged pull requests to the main repository.
Technical Details
We use electron-packager to generate the artifacts and electron-builder to generate the installer.
electron-packager details:
dist-info.js contains the various metadata we provide to Desktop as part of packaging. This seems fairly stable, but we might need to tweak some things in here for Linux-specific changes.
electron-builder details:
We use electron-builder-linux.yml to configure the installers, so please investigate the documentation if you find a problem with an installer to see if something has been overlooked and can be fixed fairly easily.