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Juan Cruz Viotti b75dfd3ece feat(GUI): implement Windows elevation using a native module (#1366 )

Sentry error reports showcase that elevation errors on Windows are one
of the most frequent Windows errors.

In order to perform Windows elevation, we ship compiled EXEs of a third
party CLI elevation application (http://code.kliu.org/misc/elevate/)
that has several limitations:

- We have the scan the output of the script to determine if a user
  cancelled the elevation request, which causes all sorts of issues on
  computers where English is not the main language

- The application displays a `cmd.exe` window for some milliseconds,
  which is bad UX, that we have to workaround by distributing a patched
  version of the tool

- The CLI application has to be spawned, which seems to be problematic
  if users have anti-virus software, leading to hard to debug issues

- We don't have any control if something goes wrong

For these reasons, we decided to implement our own elevation mechanism
in C++ as a Node.js add-on, based on the `elevate.exe` code we where
previously using.

Misc changes:

- Introduce a `lib/shared/bindings.js` module to easily require local native
  add-ons

- Install `cpplint` and configure it to lint C++ files

Note that for practical reasons, the C++ code lives in this repository
rather than in a separate module. We will release this functionality in
a more accessible way in the future as part of the Etcher SDK project.

Change-Type: patch
Changelog-Entry: Fix uncaught errors when cancelling elevation requests on Windows when the system's language is not English.
Signed-off-by: Juan Cruz Viotti <jviotti@openmailbox.org>

2017-05-02 18:36:57 -04:00

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Running locally

This document aims to serve as a guide to get Etcher running locally on your development machine.

Prerequisites

Common

NodeJS (at least v6)
Python
jq
Codespell
curl
cpplint

Windows

NSIS v2.51 (v3.x won't work)
Either one of the following:
- Visual C++ 2015 Build Tools containing standalone compilers, libraries and scripts
- Install the windows-build-tools via npm with npm install --global windows-build-tools
- Visual Studio Community 2015 (free) (other editions, like Professional and Enterprise, should work too) NOTE: Visual Studio 2015 doesn't install C++ by default. You have to rerun the setup, select "Modify" and then check Visual C++ -> Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015 (see http://stackoverflow.com/a/31955339)
MinGW

The following MinGW packages are required:

msys-make
msys-unzip
msys-zip
msys-bash
msys-coreutils

OS X

Cloning the project

git clone https://github.com/resin-io/etcher
cd etcher

Installing npm dependencies

Make sure you have all the pre-requisites listed above installed in your system before running the install script.

Please make use of the following scripts to install npm dependencies rather than simply running npm install given that we need to do extra configuration to make sure native dependencies are correctly compiled for Electron, otherwise the application might not run successfully.

If you're on Windows, run the command from the Developer Command Prompt for VS2015, to ensure all Visual Studio command utilities are available in the %PATH%.

make electron-develop

Running the application

GUI

npm start

CLI

node bin/etcher

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