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by powersurge360 1416 days ago
I, too, am interested but I'm not terribly literate in elixir yet. I am aware that you can compile executables in elixir with a release command but I'd be curious to hear more about (or at least be pointed to the specific spots in the code) how the bundling was done to give you a discrete application per platform, with app icon and everything.

Having a script that opens a web browser pages is simple enough, but the extra sugar on top to wrap in an app bundle that shows up in your task bar or dock is something I am very curious about.

EDIT: Someone further down the thread linked to a more specific place and that led me to the macos.ex file[1] (which is what I was most interested in, being on macOS myself.

It looks like at least in the case of macOS it will build the bundle by hand, template in enough swift code to build the application, sign and notarize a bundle, and add the compiled elixir program in there. Pretty interesting. I guess the idea is that you write just enough swift to manage the life cycle of the compiled elixir application. It's an interesting approach but it seems like it would be frustrating and fragile.

[1]: https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/blob/355527f7e8034e...
1 comments
wojtekmach 1416 days ago
Right, so our goal was to allow configuring the bundle with app icons etc and importantly custom URL schemes and file types [1]. And then macOS- [2] and Windows- [3] specific launchers capture the "open file" and "open url" events and trigger the Elixir side of things. Another reason for native launchers is if for any reason we couldn't start the Elixir side, we want to let the user know that something went wrong and point to logs. (We have that on Mac and will have on Windows very soon.)

[1]: https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/blob/920f70817efbac...

[2]: https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/blob/920f70817efbac...

[3]: https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/blob/920f70817efbac...

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powersurge360 1416 days ago
I know linux is a future supported platform but as far as I'm aware, there's not a clear unified way to build bundles in this way across linux distributions. What kind of things are you folks considering if you don't mind my curiosity.
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wojtekmach 1416 days ago
We don't plan to add Linux support ourselves at the moment but we'd love a contribution.
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mercer 1415 days ago
are there any plans to also have LiveBook open up in a separate wrapper app, like Electron?
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