Add FreeBSD support to electron

[ghost]

Related: #2452

[zcbenz]

As mentioned in #2452, currently we don't have any plan to add support for FreeBSD, but if anyone is interested in sending a pull request, we will be very happy to accept it.

[ghost]

Hi @zcbenz,

Could you please keep this open? I opened the request and added a bounty to encourage someone to send in a PR adding in FreeBSD support.

Thank you,
Teran

[zcbenz]

Okay.

[yonas]

I'm getting close to compiling electron on FreeBSD 10.3.

I have two errors standing in my way:

https://gist.github.com/yonas/06d08aa591e4a452b16c1e9a9ac5e0f3

but I'm not sure how to fix them. Any C/C++ gurus here? :)

[ghost]

I see that $200 USD has been added to the bounty? Is this going to happen? I think it will rock if it does.

[yonas]

Sorry, I'll try to spend more time on this. If anyone knows C/C++ very well, there are Linux specific parts that need to be re-implemented for FreeBSD.

Yes, Electron is becoming more popular and being used in more apps than just the Atom editor. I'd love to have the Black Screen terminal running on my FreeBSD machine.

[prash-wghats]

Was able to build electron and VSCode in freebsd11RC1. the build instruction is posted in
https://gist.github.com/prash-wghats/89be1ee069d2acf23c289e9c606616e1

[yonas]

@prash-wghats Great work!!! I'm curious, why did you compile with VSCode? Is there anything that GCC or CLANG is missing?

[ilundhild]

This is awesome. Can't wait to try it out, and would love to see those changes moved forward.

[enlight]

@yonas @prash-wghats didn't build using VSCode, he built Electron & VSCode.

[prash-wghats]

@yonas Thanks. Built electron using clang, then used it to run VSCode.

[patrickalima98]

Hello electron team, my compliments!!!! First I would like to congratulate you on the project and also leave here my desire as well as many others to see the electron running in the FresBSD, your application is very impressive and it would be great if you could add support to FreeBSD I very much enjoyed the platform and it would enable the BSDS systems to leverage enabling the creation of incredible apps.

[nomadlogic]

Any chances of the patches referenced by prash-wghats commented on Oct 12, 2016 will be incorporated upstream? Are their blockers preventing this from happening, or anything the FreeBSD community can do to usher this along?

[prash-wghats]

https://github.com/prash-wghats/VSCode-For-FreeBSD/releases.
This binaries were built with freebsd 11.

[dmilith]

Would be great to get official support from the project for 4th biggest open-source system…

[probonopd]

The lack of official FreeBSD support in Electron seems to be holding back an official Session client from FreeBSD.
It gives the (incorrect?) impression that "Electron is not supported on FreeBSD", even though there is a port which suggests that it technically works.

[thenexxuz-zz]

Remember the point of this issue is not to be able to build Electron on BSD, rather the ability to build a BSD version of your app on a different platform.

On MacOS you can build a Windows version and a Linux version of your app.
On Windows you can build a Linux version and a MasOS version of your app.
On Linux you can build a MacOS version and Windows version of your app.

I donated to this so that ANY OS can build a BSD version of their app.

[ghost]

Remember the point of this issue is not to be able to build Electron on BSD, rather the ability to build a BSD version of your app on a different platform.

On MacOS you can build a Windows version and a Linux version of your app.
On Windows you can build a Linux version and a MasOS version of your app.
On Linux you can build a MacOS version and Windows version of your app.

Could anyone put it into the issue desc, then (i can't due to lack of permissions)

[grahamperrin]

Could anyone put it into the issue desc …

@electron-triage | @electron ▲ merci

[ghost]

Greetings! There is already a port of Electron for FreeBSD (https://github.com/tagattie/FreeBSD-Electron) by @tagattie

[probonopd]

Electron is in FreeBSD Ports now:
https://www.freshports.org/devel/electron13/

But FreeBSD is not supported by Electron in electron-builder etc. if I understand it correctly. Or how does one build an Electron app targeting FreeBSD?

[TZubiri]

Remember the point of this issue is not to be able to build Electron on BSD, rather the ability to build a BSD version of your app on a different platform.

On MacOS you can build a Windows version and a Linux version of your app. On Windows you can build a Linux version and a MasOS version of your app. On Linux you can build a MacOS version and Windows version of your app.

I donated to this so that ANY OS can build a BSD version of their app.

How quaint. I don't use electron or FreeBSD, but my understanding was that electron app are just local websites run on an (statically linked?) (chromium?) browser, so the objective here would be to "simply" bundle the html, js and css files and make sure that freebsd opens those with the browser?

Seems more than doable.

[HolgerJeromin]

How quaint. I don't use electron or FreeBSD, but my understanding was that electron app are just local websites run on an (statically linked?) (chromium?) browser, so the objective here would be to "simply" bundle the html, js and css files and make sure that freebsd opens those with the browser?

Electron is much more than a lightweight browser. It has many JS APIs which allows native integration (file access, systray icon, custom API of the integrator, window chrome aka no address bar and more) which must not be available (on purpose) with any random, untrusted website.

[thenexxuz]

Electron is in FreeBSD Ports now: https://www.freshports.org/devel/electron13/

But FreeBSD is not supported by Electron in electron-builder etc. if I understand it correctly. Or how does one build an Electron app targeting FreeBSD?

That is the point of this issue. Have BSD as a target so that while on any of the other OSs, you can build a BSD version of your app.

[rilysh]

I found several people were successfully able to build electron on FreeBSD but pretty much in hacky way, and several third-party build I was able to find, but most of them are quite outdated.

Seems there are no hope at all #36325 (comment), until FreeBSD gets a wide range of users, well macOS contains a lot of FreeBSD code, yet Electron just never give native support for FreeBSD and to be honest, this time probably porting GNU/Linux version of Electron for FreeBSD would be *best* choice so far.

[probonopd]

Visual Studio Code - Open Source ("Code - OSS") is a thing. And it works nicely on FreeBSD. It uses https://www.freshports.org/devel/electron18/.

[rilysh]

Here, I'm not talking about ports, I know electron port exist for FreeBSD, however, my main intention is officially support thing.

[yonas]

@zcbenz

As mentioned in #2452, currently we don't have any plan to add support for FreeBSD, but if anyone is interested in sending a pull request, we will be very happy to accept it.

I've created a PR that should be applied to v22.3.23, not HEAD: #39761

[hhartzer]

Very cool! Would it be possible to rebase it to main? Quite a lot of work there.