Porting Joplin to FreeBSD

[Peter2121]

Joplin is an open source alternative to Evernote. It can be used with on-premise backend or with their own cloud storage.
The killer-feature for me is the possibility to use Nextcloud as a backend (only as a backend, without a possibility to edit notes).

The desktop application is Electron based.
After some tweaks I could build and run it with Electron 39.2.7 installed from ports:

Unfortunately, my experience in JavaScript and Electron is limited, so I'm not able to build the port correctly, with the necessary tweaks correctly integrated. I hope, someone with such experience will create the correct port.

 

[jardows]

Interestingly, "Joplin" is the name of the main town near where I grew up. No relation to the musician Scott Joplin, from whom this app is named. The name alone, and the fact that people have been able to get it running on FreeBSD has piqued my interest, but I have been deterred by the Electron process. Could you share some of your experiences building and installing Electron, and what tweaks you needed to do to get Joplin running?

 

[Peter2121]

Could you share some of your experiences building and installing Electron, and what tweaks you needed to do to get Joplin running?

Nothing special, just installing Electron from ports, then downloading the last release of Joplin from their Github (sources). Then I was following the procedure that I found here solving the problems with npm packages (OK, I used yarn and not npm as it was the package manager used by Joplin devs). I needed to solve some problems with absent native binaries (I installed them from FreeBSD packages and copied to npm modules dirs). Globally, nothing special, but many manual operations that I cannot replicate inside port build. So, probably, the build system needs some tweaking to avoid these operations.

 

[nxjoseph@]

Electron ports require too much patience and power to maintain I think. Electron is such a beast that my machine could build it in over 10 hours and even maybe not. Also I don't know how to include the npm dependencies into the port, I guess you need to have some storage on freebsd.org to host some files. I saw that it has Linux distribution packages like .Deb or tar.xz, maybe a Linux port can be made but not everything is 100% possible as far as I saw.

 

[cracauer@]

Electron is a conspiracy by the CPU manufacturers to buy EPYC and Xeon MP systems.

 

[LenR]

Nothing special, just installing Electron from ports, then downloading the last release of Joplin from their Github (sources). Then I was following the procedure that I found here solving the problems with npm packages (OK, I used yarn and not npm as it was the package manager used by Joplin devs). I needed to solve some problems with absent native binaries (I installed them from FreeBSD packages and copied to npm modules dirs). Globally, nothing special, but many manual operations that I cannot replicate inside port build. So, probably, the build system needs some tweaking to avoid these operations.

I have been trying to get the desktop building on FreeBSD for a while (longer than I would like to admit). I am able to build the server and run on it under FreeBSD. I'd like to make a port of Joplin desktop, CLI, and server. I have never made a port before, but perhaps we could work together on it, or if you could help me to get Joplin building on my system, I would be grateful.

I was looking at the other electron and node apps in the ports tree as a reference. It seems that no two node/electron application ported over were done the same and whatever manual steps you did may already have a solution there.

 

[Monti]

LenR Peter2121

Yes, a Joplin port would be very nice

 

[LenR]

I did get a copy of Joplin running on FreeBSD. However, I do have one issue. I have to use the legacy editor. The non-legacy mode returns the error:

Unrecognized extension value in extension set ([object Object]). This sometimes happens because multiple instances of @codemirror/state are loaded, breaking instanceof checks.

in the editor pane. I can reproduce the build by hand and I am working on the patches needed to make a port but I am still figuring out how to build electron and node apps via ports system.