IMPORTANT: This repo is deprecated! - deltachat-node has moved to core repo.

deltachat-node was moved to the core repo in deltachat-core-rust#3283.

New location: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/tree/master/node

deltachat-node

node.js bindings for deltachat-core-rust

If you are upgrading: please see UPGRADING.md.

deltachat-node primarily aims to offer two things:

• A high level JavaScript api with syntactic sugar
• A low level c binding api around deltachat-core-rust

Table of Contents

Install

By default the installation will build try to use the bundled prebuilds in the npm package. If this fails it falls back to compile the bundled deltachat-core-rust from the submodule using scripts/rebuild-core.js. To install from npm use:

npm install deltchat-node

Dependencies

• Nodejs >= v16.0.0
• rustup (optional if you can't use the prebuilds)

On Windows, you may need to also install Perl to be able to compile deltachat-core.

Build from source

If you want to build from source, make sure that you have rustup installed. You can either use npm install deltachat-node --build-from-source to force building from source or clone this repository and follow this steps:

1. git clone https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-node.git
2. cd deltachat-node
3. npm i

Workaround to build for x86_64 on Apple's M1

deltachat doesn't support universal (fat) binaries (that contain builds for both cpu architectures) yet, until it does you can use the following workaround to get x86_64 builds:

$ fnm install 17 --arch x64
$ fnm use 17
$ node -p process.arch
# result should be x64
$ cd deltachat-core-rust && rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin && cd -
$ git apply patches/m1_build_use_x86_64.patch
$ CARGO_BUILD_TARGET=x86_64-apple-darwin npm run build
$ npm run test

(when using fnm instead of nvm, you can select the architecture) If your node and electron are already build for arm64 you can also try bulding for arm:

$ fnm install 16 --arch arm64
$ fnm use 16
$ node -p process.arch
# result should be arm64
$ npm_config_arch=arm64 npm run build
$ npm run test

Usage

const { Context } = require('deltachat-node')

const opts = {
  addr: '[email]',
  mail_pw: '[password]',
}

const contact = '[email]'

async function main() {
  const dc = Context.open('./')
  dc.on('ALL', console.log.bind(null, 'core |'))

  try {
    await dc.configure(opts)
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Failed to configure because of: ', err)
    dc.unref()
    return
  }

  dc.startIO()
  console.log('fully configured')

  const contactId = dc.createContact('Test', contact)
  const chatId = dc.createChatByContactId(contactId)
  dc.sendMessage(chatId, 'Hi!')

  console.log('sent message')

  dc.once('DC_EVENT_SMTP_MESSAGE_SENT', async () => {
    console.log('Message sent, shutting down...')
    dc.stopIO()
    console.log('stopped io')
    dc.unref()
  })
}

main()

this example can also be found in the examples folder examples/send_message.js

Generating Docs

We are curently migrating to automaticaly generated documentation. You can find the old documentation at old_docs.

to generate the documentation, run:

npx typedoc

The resulting documentation can be found in the docs/ folder. An online version can be found under js.delta.chat.

Developing

Tests and Coverage

Running npm test ends with showing a code coverage report, which is produced by nyc.

The coverage report from nyc in the console is rather limited. To get a more detailed coverage report you can run npm run coverage-html-report. This will produce a html report from the nyc data and display it in a browser on your local machine.

To run the integration tests you need to set the DCC_NEW_TMP_EMAIL environment variables. E.g.:

$ export DCC_NEW_TMP_EMAIL=https://testrun.org/new_email?t=[token]
$ npm run test

Scripts

We have the following scripts for building, testing and coverage:

• npm run coverage Creates a coverage report and passes it to coveralls. Only done by Travis.
• npm run coverage-html-report Generates a html report from the coverage data and opens it in a browser on the local machine.
• npm run generate-constants Generates constants.js and events.js based on the deltachat-core-rust/deltachat-ffi/deltachat.h header file.
• npm install After dependencies are installed, runs node-gyp-build to see if the native code needs to be rebuilt.
• npm run build Rebuilds all code.
• npm run build:core Rebuilds code in deltachat-core-rust.
• npm run build:bindings Rebuilds the bindings and links with deltachat-core-rust.
• ǹpm run clean Removes all built code
• npm run prebuildify Builds prebuilt binary to prebuilds/$PLATFORM-$ARCH. Copies deltachat.dll from deltachat-core-rust for windows.
• npm run download-prebuilds Downloads all prebuilt binaries from github before npm publish.
• npm run submodule Updates the deltachat-core-rust submodule.
• npm test Runs standard and then the tests in test/index.js.
• npm run test-integration Runs the integration tests.
• npm run hallmark Runs hallmark on all markdown files.

Releases

The following steps are needed to make a release:

1. Update CHANGELOG.md (and run npm run hallmark to adjust markdown)

• Add release changelog in top section
• Also adjust links to github prepare links at the end of the file

2. Bump version number in package.json
3. Commit the changed files, commit message should be similiar to Prepare for v1.0.0-foo.number
4. Tag the release with git tag -a v1.0.0-foo.number
5. Push to github with git push origin master --tags
6. Wait until Make Package github action is completed
7. Download deltachat-node.tgz from the github release and run npm publish deltachat-node.tgz to publish it to npm. You probably need write rights to npm.

License

Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE file for details.

Copyright © 2018 DeltaChat contributors.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.