maktrix / appmaker

An exploration in making app authoring available to non-developers

Appmaker

Welcome to Appmaker (beta).

Appmaker is a tool that helps anyone, not just developers, create mobile applications.

Appmaker apps are composed of web components, custom/resusable HTML tags, connected with events and listeners.

To learn more about web components, check out the Polymer Project.

More resources:

• The Appmaker website.
• The #appmaker channel on irc.mozilla.org.
• A youtube video (that's already dated, but better than nothing).
• Appmaker -- why, what how provides additional context about the motivation and use cases for the project, written before any code was forged.
• The ROADMAP.md and CONTRIBUTING.md documents in this directory.

Getting Started

This section covers how to get Appmaker running locally. The workflow is optimized for contributors.

Dependencies

Make sure you have nodejs, npm, and git installed.

grunt is required to run the test suite. To install grunt on unix and OS X, run sudo npm install -g grunt-cli.

We manage client-side dependencies using bower. In order to add/remove these dependencies, you need to have bower installed globally on your machine, which can be done on unix and OS X via sudo npm install bower -g.

Forking And Cloning The Repository

Create a root mozilla-appmaker directory:

mkdir mozilla-appmaker
cd mozilla-appmaker

Fork this repository, and then clone your fork into the mozilla-appmaker directory:

git clone [email protected]:<your GitHub username>/appmaker.git appmaker

Your directory structure should look like this:

mozilla-appmaker/
  ├── appmaker/

Configure remote:

cd appmaker
git remote add upstream [email protected]:mozilla-appmaker/appmaker.git
git fetch upstream

Environment Setup And Configuration

Install Node packages:

npm install

Configure your env:

cp sample.env .env

A short explanation of a complete .env file:

MONGO_URL: REQUIRED - the URI for your mongod instance and database, for example mongodb://localhost/appmakerdev (or whatever your database is named)
COOKIE_SECRET: A long, complex string for cookie encryption (NOTE: You define this for your local use, the string can be anything).
STORE: Storage approach for publishing apps. `local` is the default, `s3` requires additional environment variables (prefixed by S3_)
S3_BUCKET: S3 bucket name. e.g. "my.coolappmaker.com"
S3_KEY: An access key for the S3 bucket listed above.
S3_SECRET: The secret corresponding to the specified S3 access key.
S3_OBJECT_PREFIX: String to prepend S3 objects. Useful for storing objects in folders. E.g. "level1/level2" => <bucket>/level1/level2/<filename>.
PUBLISH_URL_PREFIX: String to prepend to filenames that are saved when publishing. Try use the URL that matches the protocol from which assets are hosted to avoid mixed content blockage.
PERSONA_AUDIENCE: The hostname and port of Appmaker used by Persona for authentication
PORT: The port that the web process listens on for incomming connections
GITHUB_TOKEN: A personal Github token used for loading lists of components from the mozilla-appmaker org during development (https://github.com/blog/1509-personal-api-tokens)
EXCLUDED_COMPONENTS: A comma-delimited list of component repositories to exclude from the mozilla-appmaker org. The name is the repo name rather than the component name, though this is usually the same.
BUNDLE: Any non-null value will cause the application to bundle as many resources as possible

Install and run MongoDB

1. Install from MongoDB installation packages, brew, apt-get, etc
2. Either configure MongoDB to run on startup or manually start the mongod daemon. You can also run mongod from foreman by adding it to your Procfile

mongod

Start the Server

foreman start

or

foreman start -p <PORT>

If you need foreman:

sudo gem install foreman

NOTE: foreman's configuration file is Procfile in the root of the appmaker directory Foreman explanation: http://blog.daviddollar.org/2011/05/06/introducing-foreman.html

How you can help

• Fix issues by submitting Pull Requests
• Submit new components
• Add issues
• Build apps
• Run workshops
• Join our weekly call

Component Development

Required reading: https://github.com/mozilla-appmaker/appmaker/blob/develop/public/ceci/README.md

Ceci is a set of foundational elements used in a AppMaker app, implemented as a set of Polymer components. If you create a new component, it's really an HTML tag that Polymer processes and then injects a variety of capabilities into that tag / JS object

Example AppMaker Component

TODO link to the Counter example, provide explanation

Submitting A Pull Request

Switch to develop branch:

cd mozilla-appmaker/appmaker
git checkout develop

Pull the latest version:

git pull

Create a new branch (for example a feature branch):

git checkout -b your-feature-branch-name

Make changes to the local copy, commit your changes, and then make sure your patch still works with latest version of develop branch:

git checkout develop
git pull
git checkout your-feature-branch-name
git rebase develop

Test commits:

grunt

Submit changes:

git push origin your-feature-branch-name

Submit the pull request at https://github.com/mozilla-appmaker/appmaker. For more assistance, see Github's help page on creating a pull request.