Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
90 lines (66 loc) · 4.5 KB

DEVELOPMENT.md

File metadata and controls

90 lines (66 loc) · 4.5 KB
Raw

Development Overview

The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of the application architecture.

Technologies

Insomnia is a desktop application built on top of Electron. Electron provides a Chromium runtime for the Insomnia web app to run inside of, as well as additional tools to provide access to operating system features.

There are a few more technologies and tools worth mentioning:

  • React is the library used for all UI components.
  • styled-components and Less are used for styling UI components.
  • Electron Builder is used to help build, sign, and package Insomnia for distribution.
  • Flow is used for adding types to the codebase. Not everything is Flow but all new code should be typed with Flow.
  • Webpack is the bundler used to compile the JS/Less/babel/etc libcurl library that Insomnia uses to make requests. Libcurl is the HTTP client of choice because it allows the deepest amount of debuggability and control of HTTP requests.
  • nedb a local in-memory database.
  • node-libcurl is a NodeJS wrapper around the native.
  • Codemirror is a web-based, extendable, code editor used for highlighting and linting of data formats like JSON, GraphQL, and XML.
  • Commander.js is used for building the inso CLI.

Project Structure

Insomnia uses lerna to manage multiple npm packages within a single repository. There are currently two package locations:

  • /packages contains related packages that are consumed by insomnia-app or externally.
  • /plugins contains plugin packages that are included by default with the application.

The insomnia-app Main Package

/packages/insomnia-app is the entry point for the app. All other packages are imported from this one.

There are a few notable directories inside of it:

  • /main.development.js Entry for Electron.
  • /app/main Stuff that runs inside Electron's main process.
  • /app/ui React components and styling.
  • /app/common Utilities used across both main and render processes.
  • /app/plugins Logic around installation and usage of plugins.
  • /app/models DB models used to store user data.
  • /app/network Sending requests and performing auth (eg. OAuth 2).
  • /app/templating Nunjucks and rendering related code.
  • /app/sync(-legacy)? and /app/accounts Team sync and account stuff.

Data and State Architecture

Insomnia stores data in a few places:

  • A local in-memory NeDB database stores data for data models (requests, folder, workspaces, etc).
  • A local Redux store contains an in-memory copy of all database entities.
  • Multiple React Context stores, defined in /app/ui/context.

Eventually, Redux could/should be removed, which would both reduce memory overhead and simplify the codebase. NeDB should essentially replace it

Automated testing

We use Jest and react-testing-library to write our unit tests, and Spectron for integration tests.

Unit tests exist alongside the file under test. For example:

  • /app/common/database.js contains the database business logic
  • /app/common/__tests__/database.test.js contains the database tests

Unit tests for components follow the same pattern.

The structure for smoke tests is explained in the smoke testing package: packages/insomnia-smoke-test.

Technical Debt

This is just brief summary of Insomnia's current technical debt.

  • Loading large responses (~20MB) can crash the app on weaker hardware.
  • Redux stores an in-memory duplicate of the local DB, unnecessarily doubling memory usage. Moving forward, Redux shouldn't need to be considered much and may be able to be removed eventually.
  • Bundling libcurl (native module) has caused many weeks of headaches trying to get builds working across Windows, Mac, and Linux. More expertise here is definitely needed.
  • All input fields that support templating/autocomplete/etc are actually Codemirror instances. This isn't really debt but may affect things going forward.
  • Use of libcurl means Insomnia can't run in a web browser and can't support bidirectional socket communication.