Contributing to Apps-Engine
Contribute to our Open Source Apps Engine framework increasing the world of possibilities of integrations around the Rocket.Chat ecosystem
Being Open Source, we always welcome contributors to help us out develop the ultimate chat platform. You can check out our Apps Engine repository here.
An awesome place to start is looking at our open issues and determining if you can help us with them.
When developing new functionalities, you need to integrate the local version of the Apps-Engine with your local version of Rocket.Chat.
- To start, clone the Apps Engine repository and navigate into the directory by running
git clone https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.Apps-engine.git
cd Rocket.Chat.Apps-engine
- Next, install all the required packages and compile the changes since that is what Rocket.Chat itself will execute.
npm install
npm run compile
- Setup your Rocket.Chat environment following the guide on
- After setting up, navigate into the directory and run
meteor npm install PATH_TO_APPS_ENGINE
Where
PATH_TO_APPS_ENGINE is the path to the Apps-Engine repo you cloned earlier.- You can now start your Rocket.Chat with the
meteorcommand, it will use your local Apps-Engine instead of the one on NPM :)
Whenever you make changes to the engine, run
npm run compile again - meteor will take care of restarting the server due to the changes.- 1.Sometimes, when you update the Apps-Engine code and compile it while Rocket.Chat is running; you run into errors similar to these:
Unable to resolve some modules:
"@rocket.chat/apps-engine/definition/AppStatus" in
/Users/dev/rocket.chat/Rocket.Chat/app/apps/client/admin/helpers.js (web.browser)
If you notice problems related to these missing modules, consider running:
meteor npm install --save @rocket.chat/apps-engine
Restart the meteor process, and it should be fixed.
2. Sometimes when using
meteor npm install PATH_TO_APPS_ENGINE causes the following error :-npm ERR! code ENOENT
npm ERR! syscall rename
npm ERR! path PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT/node_modules/.staging/@rocket.chat/apps-engine-c7135600/node_modules/@babel/code-frame
npm ERR! dest PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT/node_modules/.staging/@babel/code-frame-f3697825
npm ERR! errno -2
npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, rename 'PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT/node_modules/.staging/@rocket.chat/apps-engine-c7135600/node_modules/@babel/code-frame' -> 'PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT/node_modules/.staging/@babel/code-frame-f3697825'
npm ERR! enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
npm ERR! enoent
Here
PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT is the path to the main Rocket.Chat server repo in your system. To fix this, we reinstall the package once again and delete the previous package~/Rocket.Chat$ rm -rf node_modules/@rocket.chat/apps-engine
~/Rocket.Chat$ cd PATH_TO_APP_ENGINE
~/Rocket.Chat.Apps-engine$ npm install
~/Rocket.Chat.Apps-engine$ cd PATH_TO_ROCKETCHAT
~/Rocket.Chat$ meteor npm install ../Rocket.Chat.Apps-engine