Field Desktop is a modern take on flexible field and find recording for archaeological excavations. It is developed as a cooperation between the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Head Office of the GBV Common Library Network (GBV). Field Desktop is completely Open Source and free to use!
Please refer to the wiki.
Development of Field Desktop works under MacOS, Windows and Linux. In any case, before you start, make sure you have NodeJS 20.18 as well as Node Package Manager (NPM) installed.
Then clone this repository locally and run the following commands (in the repository root):
$ npm run bootstrap
$ cd core
$ npm run build
$ cd ../desktop
$ npm start
npm run bootstrap sets up and fetches the necessary dependencies, while npm start compiles the Angular app and starts it via Electron.
If the application does not start in an arm64 environment (e. g. Apple Silicon), set this NPM configuration parameter before bootstrapping the application:
$ npm config set cpu=arm64
There seems to be an issue with lerna bootstrap that prevents running install scripts in dependencies. Use the following commands to run necessary scripts manually as a workaround:
$ node node_modules/electron/install.js
$ node node_modules/electron-chromedriver/download-chromedriver.js
The app must have been built (npm run build:test) before running the tests.
To execute the unit tests, run
$ npm test
The project is set up to manage the compilation of the sources (test as well as regular sources) independently from Angular. This is due to the fact that we perform Node based tests, since our code runs in an Electron context. This is done on the
basis of test/tsconfig.json and jasmine. To rebuild the sources for tests continually, you can run npm run build:test+watch in one terminal window, and npm test in another.
For troubleshooting information see here.
To execute e2e tests, run
$ npm run e2e
To execute integration test with Field Hub, run
$ npm run test:hub-integration --prefix desktop
The Field Hub integration tests require installed Docker.
To create binaries run (in repository root):
$ npm run build
$ cd desktop
$ npm run package:[mac|win|lnx]
Only packages for the selected target platform are created. When the command has finished execution, you find packages of the application in the release directory.
Please note that when using Windows, due to nested node_modules and the windows default maximum path length you might be running into errors while attempting to extract the package. In that case, please use a different archiver, for example 7-Zip.