Rubberduck native host

This is the native host application for the Rubberduck browser extension. The native host manages git repositories on your file system, and runs a language server to give usages and definitions.

To install the native application, run:

npm install -g rubberduck-native

Development

The native host uses message passing to communicate with the browser extension, built over the Native Messaging APIs.

The native host application runs as a binary, because #!/usr/bin/node is not available in $PATH when Chrome launches the host.

The binary is built using pkg, after compiling the code with tsc. Before you build, ensure you are on node version 8.3.0 (so that we can use a pre-built image from nexe releases).

nvm use 8.3.0
npm run compile

To register the binary with Chrome (use -b to specify the binary location):

node register -b /Users/arjun/mercury-extension/native-host/bin/rubberduck-native-mac

The binary supports macOS only. With a few changes to the compile and register script definitions, we will be able to support Windows and Linux as well.