What is Joplin built/running in?

Development
23

I see that you didn’t include the * in the first attempt to run it. That symbol tells bash to run any AppImages that begin with Joplin without you having to type the full file name. It saves time and is just an advanced shortcut for what you’re trying to do. You don’t want to use it everywhere, just Electron builds only one AppImage.

Something I’m noticing is that you may not be all that experienced with running command line tools for development purposes. I would highly recommend before going any further with development here or elsewhere is to freshen up on how Linux terminals are ran and get a good idea of how to debug code and apps when running them from the terminal. The devs here are fairly patient but because the team is primarily one guy with multiple contributors, they may not have the time or resources to help with every issue that you are running into.

I’m not very experienced with Reactjs or Javascript in general, so for my own personal contributions here, I am definitely experiencing this a bit first hand; it’s very understandable and I, personally, have quite a ways to go to be substantially useful to this project outside of helping with bugs and helping here on the forum. I’m ok with that, and I hope you feel the same way about your development journey and are willing to grit it out and get better.

24

I understand the basics of the terminal and Electron and React in particular, it's special, Linux specific things that I'm still learning about like the * symbol.

That's not the issue though, something about yarn dist did it because I can no longer even boot it from the gui.

What are some other ways that you help?

1 Like
25

Ah, I found that following all the steps again and now run a new appimage again form both the terminal and the gui. However, it still shoes the empty page and default toolbar https://imgur.com/a/Q8hBQr2

26

The biggest things I’m great at are figuring out the maze that is code oftentimes and I know Linux tools pretty extensively. I also have quite a bit of experience with several other languages, just nothing remotely related to web based apps and design.

Also, about your issue with the white page, what drivers are you running and what kind of graphics card does your computer have?

27

My Graphics card is a GTX 1060, I don’t know what version my drivers are but it’s running off of the stock drivers you can get when first installing your OS (The Checkbox that says “Install Proprietary Drivers”).

28

So you’re running the proprietary Nvidia ones. Gotya. They’re actually what I run when I’m on a desktop with an Nvidia card. Although, for my current task, I had to rebuild my database to test out Notebook Icons showing and ran into the white screen issue you were talking about. I’m on an Intel card and when it happens, my terminal throws an ElectronGL exception, so that’s probably an upstream issue.

If you have everything backed up, I’ve found that deleting the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/joplin-desktop directory should solve the issue. I would definitely back it up just in case, though.

29

Did you run a npm i in the directory ReactNativeClient/lib/joplin-renderer/?

1 Like
30

Where is XDA_CONFIG_HOME located? I don’t seen anything in root, home, or Joplin’s own files.

31

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is a path variable linking to the main configuration directory in a user’s home folder.

If your system has it, echo $XDG_CONFIG_HOME should result in a path name. If not, you can use either $HOME/.config/joplin-desktop/ or ~/.config/joplin-desktop/. Both should work.

Like I said previously, you should definitely freshen up on basic Linux tools and command line usage. The questions you are asking now are very basic, beginner questions that learning about will definitely give you quite a bit of room to do other tasks.

32

I didn’t because we were dealing with Electron, but after running it I get the following:

1 package is looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details
found 0 vulnerabilities
33

Having a white, blank window usually means that dependencies are missing. Thus I suspect that you built the app without the proper packages in ReactNativeClient/lib/joplin-renderer/.

34

I only know it as .config, that was my issue. Deleting joplin-desktop and then running the appimage yields not change in result.

35

That’s what I was originally suspecting, is there something I can use to determine if I have the proper packages and if not which one’s need to be installed?

36

I’m bailing on this conversation. I’m definitely no help here and am further causing this to stray from Joplin. Good luck.

37

If you run npm i in the proper directories, you are good. Unless you added code yourself and forgot to update the package.json file.

Application Directory
All ReactNativeClient/lib/joplin-renderer
Desktop ElectronClient/app
Mobile ReactNativeClient
CLI / terminal CliClient
38

After running it in all directories you mentioned, I get a few warnings about optional dependencies not being compatible, along with the usual funding notice, but those shouldn’t be causing it, is there anything else that could be causing the problem?

39

The notices are irrelevant. Hmm, oh wait, I heard that there might be an issue with node 13 (can’t recall why though). Other than that I have no idea.
Maybe somebody else does.

40

I’m running Node 13.7.0, what should I go to?

41

Could you post the commands you’re running and the error messages you’re getting?

44

Ok, To make things easier to track I wiped out the Joplin instillation I have now cloned from scratch, here is a raw paste console log of everything I’ve done so far:

https://pastebin.com/KF8MwRaf