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Zulip Flutter (beta)

A Zulip client for Android and iOS, using Flutter.

This app is currently in beta. When it's ready, it will become the new official mobile Zulip client. To see what work is planned before that launch, see the milestones and the project board.

Using Zulip

To use Zulip on iOS or Android, install the official mobile Zulip client.

You can also try out this beta app.

Contributing

Contributions to this app are welcome.

If you're looking to participate in Google Summer of Code with Zulip, this is one of the projects we're accepting GSoC 2024 applications for.

Picking an issue to work on

First, see the Zulip project guide to your first codebase contribution. Follow the instructions there for joining the Zulip community server, reading about what makes a great Zulip contributor, browsing through recent commits and the codebase, and the Zulip guide to Git.

To find possible issues to work on, see our project board. Look for issues up through the "Launch" milestone, and that aren't already assigned.

Follow the Zulip guide to picking an issue to work on, trying several issues until you find one you're confident you'll be able to take on effectively.

After you've done that, claim the issue by posting a comment on the issue thread, saying you'd like to work on it and describing your progress.

Asking questions, getting help

To ask for help with working on this codebase, use the #mobile-dev-help channel on chat.zulip.org. Before participating there for the first time, be sure to take a minute to read our community norms.

For more in-depth advice on how to go beyond the minimum represented by our community norms, see Zulip's guide to asking great questions and the resources linked from there.

Submitting a pull request

Follow the Zulip project's guide to your first codebase contribution for working on an issue and submitting a pull request. It's important to take the time to make your work as easy as possible for others to review.

Two specific points to expand on:

Before we can review your PR in detail, your changes will need tests. See "Writing tests" below.

It will also need all new and existing tests to be passing. See "Tests" below about running the tests.
Your changes will need to be organized into clear and coherent commits, following Zulip's commit style guide.

This is always required before we can merge your PR. Depending on your changes' complexity, it may also be required before we can review it in detail. (The main exception is that if the change should be a single commit, we can review it even with a messier commit structure.)

Getting started in developing this beta app

Setting up

Running the app requires only a standard Flutter setup, using the Flutter main channel:

Follow the Flutter installation guide for your platform of choice.
Switch to the latest version of Flutter by running flutter channel main and flutter upgrade (see Flutter version below).
Ensure Flutter is correctly configured by running flutter doctor.
Start the app with flutter run, or from your IDE.

Parts of our test suite require an additional dependency:

Install SQLite, for example by running sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev.

Developing on Windows requires an additional step:

Run git config core.autocrlf input.

For more details and help with unusual configurations, see our full setup guide.

If you're having trouble or seeing errors, take a look through our troubleshooting section. If that doesn't resolve the issue, see the section above on how to ask for help.

Flutter version

We use the latest Flutter from Flutter's main branch. Use flutter channel main and flutter upgrade.

Because each version of Flutter provides its own version of the Dart SDK, this also means we use the latest Dart SDK.

Using the latest versions is the same thing Google does with their own Flutter apps. It's valuable to us because it means when there's something we want to fix in Flutter, or a feature we want to add, we can send a PR upstream and then use it as soon as it's merged.

We don't pin a specific Flutter version, because Flutter itself doesn't offer a way to do so. So far that hasn't been a problem. When it becomes one, we'll figure it out; there are several tools for this in the Flutter community. See issue #15.

Tests

You can run all our forms of tests with the tools/check script:

$ tools/check

See tools/check --help for more information.

The two major test suites are the Dart analyzer, which performs type-checking and linting; and our unit tests, located in the test/ directory.

You can run these suites directly with the commands flutter analyze and flutter test respectively. Both commands accept a list of file or directory paths to operate on, and other options. Particularly recommended is a command like

$ flutter test test/foo/bar_test.dart --name 'baz'

which will run only the tests in test/foo/bar_test.dart, and within those only the tests with names matching baz.

When editing in an IDE, the IDE should give you the exact same feedback as flutter analyze would. When editing a test file, the IDE can also run individual tests for you. See upstream docs on flutter test.

Notes

UI design

For issues that call for building new UI, we typically have a design in Figma which will be linked from the issue description.

When there is a design in Figma, a PR implementing the issue should match the design exactly, except where there's a good reason to make things different. Like with any difference between a PR and previous plans, you should explain the difference clearly in your PR description.

For colors, padding, font sizes, and similar design details, it's rare to have a good reason to differ from the design in Figma. When reviewing your work (which you should do before every PR), take some time to look closely through all the details of the design in Figma and confirm that they're matched in your PR.

In our code, many colors and other details appear on DesignVariables or similar classes like ContentTheme. If you need a Figma variable which doesn't yet appear in our code, please add it.

Writing tests

We write tests for all changes to the Dart code in the app. Because Flutter and Dart have excellent facilities for testing, we're able to efficiently write tests even for kinds of code that often go untested: UI code, and code that makes network requests or calls external APIs.

You may sometimes find code that doesn't have tests. This is generally code from the early prototype phase; when we make changes to it, we write tests for the changes, and often take the opportunity to write tests for the existing logic too.

When it's time to write a test, look around at existing tests in the same test file or at our existing tests for similar code, and follow the patterns we use there. Notes on specific kinds of tests:

For UI code, we use Flutter's standard testWidgets function. Many widgets will interact with the user's data; see docs on our TestZulipBinding and TestGlobalStore, and existing tests that use testBinding.globalStore, for how to manipulate test data there.
For code that makes Zulip API requests, use FakeApiConnection; see its docs and the existing tests that use it.
For code that makes other network requests, look for similar existing tests; or see our FakeHttpClient, and use withHttpClient from package:http to cause the code under test to use it.
For code that invokes Flutter plugins or otherwise calls external APIs, see our ZulipBinding class. If there isn't an existing member of that class that wraps the API you're using, then you'll need to add one; follow the existing examples.

`check` vs. `expect`

For our tests, we use the checks package. This is a new package from the Dart team, currently in preview, which is intended to replace the old matcher package.

This means that if you see example test code elsewhere that uses the expect function, we'd prefer to translate it into something in terms of check. For help with that, see the package:checks migration guide and the package's API docs.

Because package:checks is still in preview, the Dart team is open to feedback on the API to a degree that they won't be after it reaches 1.0. So where we find rough edges, now is a good time to report them as issues.

Editing API types

Server compatibility

We support Zulip Server 4.0 and later.

For API features added in newer versions, use TODO(server-N) comments (like those you see in the existing code.)

Require all parameters in API constructors

In our API types, constructors should generally avoid default values for their parameters, even null. This means writing e.g. required this.foo rather than just this.foo, even when foo is nullable.

We do this because it's common in the Zulip API for a null or missing value to be quite salient in meaning, and not a boring value appropriate for a default, so that it's best to ensure callers make an explicit choice.

If passing explicit values in tests is cumbersome, a factory function in test/example_data.dart is an appropriate way to share defaults.

Generated files

When editing any of the type definitions in our API, you'll need to keep up to date the corresponding generated code (which handles converting JSON to and from our types).

To do this, run the following command:

$ dart run build_runner watch --delete-conflicting-outputs

That build_runner watch command watches for changes in relevant files and updates the generated code as needed.

When the build_runner watch command has finished its work and is waiting for more changes, you may find it convenient to suspend it by pressing Ctrl+Z before you edit the code further. While suspended, the command will not run. After editing the source files further, you can update the generated files again by running the command fg in the terminal where build_runner watch had been running. The fg command causes the suspended command to resume running (in the foreground, hence the name fg), just like it was doing before Ctrl+Z.

If a PR is missing required updates to these generated files, CI will fail at the build_runner suite.

Upgrading Flutter

We regularly increment our lower bounds on Flutter and Dart versions, to make sure there's not too much divergence in the versions people are using.

When there's a new beta (which happens a couple of times per month), that's a good prompt to do this. We also do this when there's a new PR merged that we particularly want to take.

To update the version bounds:

Use flutter upgrade to upgrade your local Flutter and Dart.
Run tools/upgrade flutter-local, which makes a commit updating pubspec.yaml and pubspec.lock to match your local Flutter.
Build and run the app for a quick smoke-check.
Send the changes as a PR.

Upgrading dependencies

When adding or upgrading dependencies, try to keep our generated files updated atomically with them.

In particular the CocoaPods lockfiles ios/Podfile.lock and macos/Podfile.lock frequently need an update when dependencies change. This can only be done in a macOS development environment.

If you have access to a Mac, then for upgrading dependencies, use the script tools/upgrade. Or after adding a new dependency, run the commands (cd ios && pod update) && (cd macos && pod update) to apply any needed updates to the CocoaPods lockfiles.

If you don't have convenient access to a Mac, then just mention clearly in your PR that the upgrade needs syncing for CocoaPods, and someone else can do it before merging the PR.

(Ideally we would validate these automatically in CI: #329. Several other kinds of generated files are already validated in CI.)

Code formatting

Like the upstream Flutter project itself, we don't use dart format or other auto-formatters. Instead, follow the style you see in the existing code.

It's OK if in your first few PRs you haven't yet picked up all the nuances of our style. Reviewers will point out nits as they see them.

If your editor or IDE automatically reformats the existing code, you'll want to turn that off. Please also mention it in Zulip on chat.zulip.org and describe what editor you were using; we'd like to include such configuration directly in the repo so it's automatic for the next person. We already have that for VS Code, and it seems to be the default for Android Studio / IntelliJ, but when there are cases we haven't covered we'd like to know about them.

Translations and i18n

When adding new strings in the UI, we set them up to be translated. For details on how to do this, see the translation doc.

Desktop support

This app is intended for use on mobile platforms, specifically Android and iOS.

On desktop platforms, we support running the app for development but not for general use. In particular this means:

The layout and UI are designed for mobile. We don't spend time on adapting the app to desktop UI features or paradigms.
External platform integrations (like opening a link, taking a photo, etc.) are built only for Android and iOS. We don't spend time making them work on other platforms.
On the other hand the app runs, and core functionality works, on at least Linux and macOS. Currently no regular contributor uses it on Windows, but we accept fixes to keep it running there too.

The reason we support desktop platforms at all is that for development it's sometimes useful to run the app on desktop. For example, this makes it easy to resize the window arbitrarily, which can be helpful for testing layout behavior.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

The software includes some works released by third parties under other free and open source licenses. Those works are redistributed under the license terms under which the works were received.