cordova-weinre

Deprecation Notice

This project is being deprecated. No more work will be done on this project by the Cordova development community. You can continue to use this project and it should work as-is, but issues will not be fixed by the Cordova community.

weinre was built in an age when there were no remote debuggers available for mobile devices. Since then, some platforms are starting to provide remote debugger capabilities, as part of their platform tool set.

Android: Get Started with Remote Debugging Android Devices
iOS: Safari Developer Tools overview
Windows: Debug Store apps in Visual Studio

⚠ IMPORTANT NOTE, some of weinre dependencies have security issues. Use on your own risk.

Introduction

weinre is WEb INspector REmote.

Pronounced like the word “winery”. Or maybe like the word “weiner”. Who knows, really.

weinre is a debugger for web pages, like FireBug (for FireFox) and Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it’s designed to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone.

weinre is part of the Apache Cordova project.

For descriptive information, and links to downloads, installable things, etc see: http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/

weinre source

The weinre source is contained in 4 subdirectories:

weinre.build - contains the tools to build weinre, the 3rd party libraries that weinre uses, and holds the output of the build
weinre.doc - source for the HTML manual for weinre
weinre.server - code for the node.js-based weinre server
weinre.web - code for the client and target pieces of weinre

building weinre

The weinre build is currently run on a Mac OS X 10.7 laptop. It also runs on Apache continuous integration servers running Linux. The build is not typically run on Windows, so if you have problems with that, please log an issue.

The weinre build pre-req’s the following tools:

node.js - http://nodejs.org/
ant - http://ant.apache.org/

To update the npm-based pre-reqs, you will also need:

npm - should be shipped with node.js, on Linux may need to be installed as a separate package

Before doing a weinre build, you will need to create the file weinre.build/personal.properties. Use the sample.personal.properties as a template. The build should fail if this file is not available.

To update the version label of weinre, edit the file weinre.build/build.properties. If the version has a -pre suffix, this triggers the build to artifacts with timestamped names. For an ‘official’ build, do not use the -pre suffix.

There are two ways to build weinre:

full build
development build

The full build creates all the artifacts needed for an ‘official’ build.

The development build just creates enough artifacts to test the code.

the first time you run any build:

Some semi-transient artifacts are created the first time you run a build. These will be stored in the weinre.build/cached directory.

to perform the full build:

run: cd weinre.build
run: ant build-archives

This will run the development build (see below), and then create zip archives of the build in the weinre.build/out/archives directory.

to perform the development build:

run: cd weinre.build
run: ant

This will populate a number of resources in the weinre.server directory, so that you can run weinre directly from that directory for testing. It does not build the archives.

performing a clean build:

run: cd weinre.build
run: ant clean
perform the build as usual

other ant goodies:

run: cd weinre.build
run: ant help

to run the output of the development build:

run: cd weinre.server
run: ./weinre [your flavorite options]

other fun development-time hacks

If you have the wr tool installed, there is a .wr file available to run the development builds when a source file changes.

The build is growl-enabled, so you can see a quick message when the build completes, as long as the USE_GROWL property is set in the weinre.build/personal.properties file.

The command weinre.server/weinre-hot makes use of node-supervisor to re-launch the weinre server generated by the development build, whenever a weinre build completes.

Putting this altogether, you can open two terminal windows, run wr in the main directory to have a development build run whenever you change the source, and then run weinre-hot in the weinre.server directory to have the weinre server restart whenever a build completes, getting a growl notification at that time.

updating 3rd party libraries

IMPORTANT - All 3rd party libraries are stored in the SCM, so that the build does not require 3rd party packages to be downloaded. As such, these files need to be ok to use and store in the SCM, given their licenses. If you’re adding or updating a 3rd party library, make sure the license is acceptable, and add/update the license in the top-level LICENSE file.

All of the 3rd party dependencies used with weinre are stored in one of two directories:

weinre.build/vendor - contains libraries used in the client and/or target, as well as libraries used by the build itself
weinre.server/node_modules - contains npm packages used by the weinre server

To update the files in weinre.build/vendor:

edit the file weinre.build/vendor.properties as appropriate
run: cd weinre.build
run: rm -rf vendor
run: ant -f update.vendor.xml

To update the files in weinre.server/node_modules:

edit the file weinre.build/package.json.template as appropriate
run a build (see above), so that the file weinre.server/package.json file is created from the template you edited above
run: cd weinre.server
run: rm -rf node_modules
run: npm install