@labforward/driver-tools

A CLI tool for building and managing Laboperator drivers.

Install

This package should be added as a driver's development dependency:

• yarn add -D @labforward/driver-tools

After installing, the binary laboperator-driver-tools should be available. Run npx laboperator-driver-tools --help to get more information about what the tool can do.

Development

1. Run yarn install and yarn link.
2. Run yarn build:dev to start the build process in watch mode.
3. Open a terminal on a driver repository and run yarn link @labforward/driver-tools.

Builds

Releases

Will create platform independent and fully contained drivers inside the driver's release/ folder.

The naming scheme for builds follows the pattern:

<driver name>-<tag>-<SHA-1 hash>-v<node modules version>-<os>-<arch>.zip

• The Node version is specified according the NODE_MODULES_VERSION schema found here.

If bindings are not required for the build, a single release will be made with the os set to any and arch to any.

Bundles

Will create a distributable zip file containing all multi-platform builds. The extension of this file is dpak (Driver Package).

The naming scheme for bundles follows the pattern:

<driver name>-<tag>.dpak

Hashing

It's used to uniquely identify the contents of a release. The SHA-1 hash is created by hashing all files (excluding bindings in the dist/build/ folder) inside the dist/ folder.

The SHA-1 hash is trimmed to the first 8 hex characters. With 8 hex characters we need to generate 77000 hashes to have a 50% chance of having a collision. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#Probability_table

Bindings

Changes in any of the following assumptions will break the build pipeline:

• All bindings have the extension .node.
• Webpack places all bindings inside the dist/build/Release folder.
• There is a single dependency with a bindings folder at its root-level.
• All bindings are stored inside the previously mentioned bindings folder.
• All bindings are compressed as tar.gz and contain a folder called build/Release with the bindings.
• All compressed bindings must contain the same number of bindings. Otherwise, a "dummy" binding should be added so that the amount matches.
• The compressed bindings use the standard gyp naming scheme:
  • <bindings name>-<bindings version>-node-v<node modules version>-<os>-<arch>.tar.gz

Notes on ARM bindings: currently an ARMv7 binding is provided which works with the RPi 3B+. Moving to a newer RPi will require us to recompile bindings for a newer architecture, such as ARMv8. Therefore, the ARM version is specified in the architecture.

Assets

Drivers can have static assets included in the build. To use this feature, create an assets directory in the driver's directory. The assets directory will be copied to the final build. To access the assets during development and in production, use the following code:

const assetsDir = process.env.ASSETS || '../../assets';

The variable process.env.ASSETS is defined via Webpack. The fallback path in the previous example is relative to the src/lib/DeviceDriver.js file.