Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
83 lines (57 loc) · 7.38 KB

INSTALL.md

File metadata and controls

83 lines (57 loc) · 7.38 KB
Raw

Installation For Development

This document contains instructions for setting up your local development environment and installing the dependencies required for contributing to the firefox-voice extension project.

Depending on your operating system the sections below outline the various installation steps, however in any case you need to have Firefox Nightly or Developer Edition installed. A release version, localized or unbranded version of Firefox will still suffice but some things may not work:

  1. Linux Development
  2. Windows Development

Linux Development

To get started with a Linux development environment, you would need to:

  1. Download the latest LTS version of NodeJs before running any of the provided npm commands.
  2. Download Firefox Nightly which is a pre-release version of Firefox that is updated every now and then just so you are developing and testing with the latest firefox features.
  3. Use tar xjvf to extract the binaries for FireFox Nightly into a location of your choice could be /opt/FireFoxNightly/ folder or just your download folder, wherever is fine.
  4. Let firefox-voice know where you kept the binary (firefox) for FireFox Nightly typically by running export FIREFOX=/path/to/FireFoxNightly/firefox and using our example location would be export FIREFOX=/opt/FireFoxNightly/firefox. This creates a temporary export (environment variable) called FIREFOX for your current session.

You would have to run this everytime you have a new session so you may want to look at how to let the export stick permanently

Windows Development

On windows there are two options for installation. The first option can use virtually any version of windows which supports the latest LTS version of node (currently 12.16.1) and npm (currently 6.13.4). However, all node commands/scripts have to be run within git-bash (to provide support for unix commands). The second option is to use WSL which comes with windows 10 only, for persons who may prefer this alternative.

Option 1 - Windows OS with Git-Bash

Prerequisites

  1. Latest LTS version of NodeJS
  2. Git and Git-bash
  3. Firefox Nightly or Developer Edition

Installation

Before cloning the repo, using the terminal in Git-bash:

  1. Run git config --global core.autocrlf false to prevent git from automatically converting line endings from LF to CRLF
  2. Run npm config set script-shell "path\\to\\bash.exe". Point to the path where you have git-bash installed(using double backslashes). Example of path is "C:\\Program Files\\git\\bin\\bash.exe". This enables npm to run linux-like commands.
  3. Fork and clone the repository
  4. To enable the npm scripts find your firefox installation, you need to create the environment variable FIREFOX. The easiest way to do this is to create the environment variable set to a normalized path using System properties->Advanced->Environment Variables. For example if the install path is C:\Program Files\Firefox Nightly\firefox.exe then normalized path is /c/Program Files/Firefox Nightly/firefox.exe. Alternatively, run setx FIREFOX="normalized/path/to/firefox.exe". You can also set $PROFILE to a directory where the profile information is kept (it defaults to ./Profile/). (Note: You may need to open a new terminal to detect the new environment variable.)
  5. Now run npm install to install dependencies
  6. Run npm start. This will launch a new Firefox browser with the firefox-voice extension installed.

Option 2 - Windows 10 using WSL

Prerequisites

  1. Latest LTS version of NodeJS
  2. Firefox Nightly or Developer Edition on WSL

Installation

If you are using Windows and wish to use WSL, you will need to setup Firefox Nightly or Developer on WSL before running firefox-voice using the following steps:

  1. Download firefox-nightly.tar.bz2 for Linux and move it to a folder of your choice e.g. /opt.
  2. Extract it using tar -xvjf firefox-*.tar.bz2 and move it to /opt/firefox/.
  3. Download VcXsrv on Windows and launch it with all default settings EXCEPT access control disabled.
  4. At this point, the DISPLAY variable is not set, so you may run into issues running GUI apps from XServer. To fix this, run cat /etc/resolv.conf to get the IP address of the nameserver, then run export DISPLAY=IP_ADDRESS_OF_NAMESERVER_HERE:0. You can also use this one-liner: export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2}'):0
  5. Test Firefox Nightly by launching ./firefox in the folder that you extracted the tar.bz2; this should open up Firefox Nightly.
  6. In the firefox-voice repo, export the variable FIREFOX to point the script to your installation of firefox e.g. export FIREFOX=/opt/firefox/firefox.
  7. Now, running npm start should automatically start firefox-nightly, however the sound/microphone might not be working.
  8. Download the PulseAudio binary for Windows.
  9. Extract the files to any location. You should see four folders named bin, etc, lib, and share.
  10. Edit the configuration files in etc. In default.pa, find the line starting with #load-module module-native-protocol-tcp and change it to load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1 auth-anonymous=1
  11. In daemon.conf, find the line starting with ; exit-idle-time = 20 and change it to exit-idle-time = -1 to turn off idle timer.
  12. In admin Powershell, run pulseaudio.exe under the bin folder, and keep this running.
  13. Now, you will need to install PulseAudio for WSL. Uninstall any current versions of PulseAudio using sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio.
  14. Run sudo add-apt-repository ppa:therealkenc/wsl-pulseaudio to add the PPA.
  15. Update the sources using sudo apt-get update.
  16. Install PulseAudio for WSL using sudo apt install pulseaudio.
  17. In the same folder as firefox-voices, run export PULSE_SERVER=tcp:IP_ADDRESS_OF_NAMESERVER_HERE. This will allow firefox-voices to access the Windows sound system.

macOS Development

To get started with a macOS development environment, you would need to:

  1. Make sure you have the latest LTS version of NodeJs running any of the provided npm commands.
  2. Download and install Firefox Nightly which is a pre-release version of Firefox. Firefox Nightly is updated every now and then just so you are developing and testing with the latest features.
  3. Next, you fork the repository from mozilla firefox, and then clone the forked repo to your local system by running git clone url to forked repo on your terminal.
  4. Open the repo in any IDE of your choice and run npm install, to install the dependencies.
  5. Finally, run npm start to launch a new Firefox Nightly browser with the firefox-voice installed.