Electron Builder and Travis Failures

[hacdias]

Right now, there are quite a few issues with our build process, CI and Electron Builder:

Fetching Web UI

Currently, the latest Web UI version is not pinned to the gateway. On normal circumstances, it should not be a problem because it's still pinned to the cluster. Although, the gateway is having issues connecting to cluster.

This makes build fails due to timeouts.

Solutions:

1. Make webui.ipfs.io the latest released version and dev.webui.ipfs.io the latest commit. That way, both domains shall be pinned to gateway.
2. Add a git submodule to IPFS Desktop with IPFS Web UI and build IPFS Web UI on the fly.
   • More burden when updating IPFS Web UI.

Electron Builder failing on Linux releases...

Electron builder has a bug on the latest version that makes releases fail on Travis (don't know if it happens on other CIs). Issue opened on their repo 20 days ago. No replies yet, no activity on the repo. See electron-builder#4134.

Downgrading also implicates downgrading electron which implicates changes on the code.

There's also the issue #1044, which I believe is caused by the beta binaries been built manually on a virtual machine I created because of this issue.

What to do?

Other points...

• Travis is slow.
• Windows builds can be built on either Linux or macOS. Perhaps we can remove AppVeyor/Win Executor.
• Circle CI macOS is quite expensive, worth it? https://circleci.com/pricing/#build-os-x
  • Performance plan from the 'New plans' is required for having Windows & macOS: https://circleci.com/pricing/usage/

[hacdias]

See an example that builds for Windows, macOS and Linux:

• https://dev.to/kontrollanten/super-fast-electron-builds-with-circleci--5ghn
• https://github.com/protonmail-desktop/application/blob/7289770d44f8f8acdda69f878643d354928e406e/.circleci/config.yml

[hacdias]

Working on https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-desktop/tree/chore/circleci

[hacdias]

Also, just found out we can build Windows binaries on Linux through Wine!

[hacdias]

A few updates on this issue:

1. I've created a PR to test GitHub Actions.
2. I've found another error in Travis logs which may be the actual cause of the error: there was a breaking change on Electron Builder which was not published as a major release. Snap packages now deploy to the snap store by default and since we didn't have the credentials to the snap store, build failed.
   • Note: I believe this is why it failed, but I'm not sure.

If 2 is true, we can keep using Travis+AppVeyor.

Anyways, I've contacted the AppVeyor support to delete the project: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/wubalubadubdub/ipfs-desktop-difec because it was created by an user called 'wubalubadubdub' which doesn't seem to have any relation to IPFS Shipyard, nor IPFS organisations.

If we decide to keep AppVeyor after that, I'll create a project for IPFS Desktop here.

• This is blocking the next release.
• I will be able to unblock this tonight or tomorrow with a Travis+AppVeyor setup for sure.
  • After that, I will release a pre-release and test if the setup works.
• Still waiting for the webui.ipfs.io fix.

[hacdias]

After running Travis+AppVeyor, I could successfully publish a 0.9.0-beta.3 prerelease which seems to indicate that our build process is fixed.

The problem with Electron Builder was, in fact, something else much easier but was buried deeper in the logs: see #1069.

[hacdias]

Will close this for now since the issues on IPFS Desktop side seem to be solved!