Magnium CLI

Magnium is a Command Line Tool and Framework for building Titanium based mobile applications using ES6.

Prerequisites

The Magnium Framework and associated CLI depends on an installed and working version of Axway's Appcelerator Titanium. You will need to ensure that the Titanium CLI is installed, visit Appcelerator for more information.

To test if the Titanium CLI is installed and working just type

ti --help

in a terminal.

Installation

[sudo] npm install -g magnium

History

1.2.5

Quite a few updates in a short space of time, but I am working on integrating Magnium into my Jenkins build server, hence the flurry of changes. This time it is to the assets command. I have modified it so, again, a specific directory can be passed in as a argument to allow the build workspace to be used when generating any Android assets.

• now as well as the standard command: mag assets
• it can also specify a directory to start in: mag assets --dir {dir}

1.2.4

The build command has been updated so that it works standalone and the build does not need to be part of a Magnium Workspace. This was primarily done so that Magnium could be used with CI. It allows the build/transpile to be done within a defined workspace. This has been tested on Jenkins and works as follows:

• the usual build command: mag build {projectname}
• for use with a CI system: mag build {workspace} --ci

An actual example that has been used with Jenkins is the Execute Shell Build command shown below.

echo "Starting Magnium Build...."
mag build "$WORKSPACE" --ci

Where the project source has already been cloned from an SCM system.

The final generated Titanium project is created in a mag-build directory as a child of the specified workspace. For example:

• workspace dir: /Users/abc/.jenkins/123-456/My App
• Titanium project location: /Users/abc/.jenkins/123-456/My App/mag-build

1.2.3

The default project template has been updated to show one possible way of re-skinning an app using the theme feature of the build command.

As before the standard build the command is mag build {projectname}, but an alternate skin and app icon can be applied by using mag build {projectname} --theme test. Just take a look an index.js and the theme/test directory for more detail.

1.2.2

Bug fix- any aux files in the following dirs (i18n, platform, plugins, modules) were getting copied to the wrong destination

1.2.1

The theming in the build has been updated. Rather than just a theme.js file in the theme dir (or whatever name you have given the theme), the build now looks for a theme directory. If the specified directory exists it checks, as before for a theme.js file, but it now also re-checks for both theme based aux and misc files. This enables the beginning of a build based white labelling solution for theme related tiapp.xml, DefaultIcon.png and other asset files to be related to a specific theme build.

1.2

• The transpiler now uses babel-core. This means there is no need to do the automated npm install each time the transpile is run which makes it faster and more informative in case or errors. If the transpile now stops because of an error the build will exit and the error will be displayed.
• promises.core.min.js is now deprecated and will probabbly be removed from the next version (if you use it anywhere just remove the import statement from your code), Promises will still work.
• If a directory called support exists at the root of a Magnium project (i.e. /projects/helloworld/support ) then the files in this directory will be copied to the root of the Titanium dir when running the build command. This can be used to add project based files like keystores, images etc.

1.1

The CLI has now been updated to run as a single command with options. You can use either ma or magnium to run the CLI with the following options:

• init
• create
• build
• assets

Using Magnium

Magnium provides a simple framework that allows Titanium projects to be written using ES6. It does this by using it's own custom project structure that is transpiled into a standard Titanium classic project that can then be run on simulator, device or compiled for distro using the Titanium CLI. Below is a quick overview of the steps to do this, all commands should be run in a Terminal.

NB:this has only been tested on a MAC currently and is just an overview of how to get a project up and running

• Open a Terminal and create a new directory (mkdir magnium)
• cd to that directory and initialise the magnium workspace (magnium init)
• Create a new magnium project called helloworld (magnium create helloworld)
• Use magnium to generate a standard Titanium project (magnium build helloworld)
• Generate the project Android assets, optional and requires TiCons installed (magnium assets)

The result of this should be a subdirectory named titanium that will have a complete project in. To test it just run the following Ti CLI command.

for iOS

ti build -p ios --log-level info -d titanium

for Android

ti build -p android --log-level info -d titanium --device-id

[adding --device-id allows you to select an emulator]

This should build and run the project in a simulator/emulator if all the other steps completed satisfactorily.

Assets CLI command

This command was added to provide a quick way to generate some assets for an Android project, similar to the way Titanum does for iOS. It can be used to generate a default set of icons and splash screens for an Android app using the project's DefaultIcon.png.

magnium assets

If used it should be run after magnium build and before using the Ti CLI to build the Titanium project.

Please note this will only work if you have correctly installed TiCons and any required depedencies (imagemagick).

More Detail

For more detailed information of Magnium and it's use see the wiki here