matrix-react-sdk

This is a react-based SDK for inserting a Matrix chat/voip client into a web page.

This package provides the React components needed to build a Matrix web client
using React. It is not useable in isolation, and instead must be used from
a 'skin'. A skin provides:

• Customised implementations of presentation components.
• Custom CSS
• The containing application
• Zero or more 'modules' containing non-UI functionality

As of Aug 2018, the only skin that exists is vector-im/element-web; it and
matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk should effectively
be considered as a single project (for instance, matrix-react-sdk bugs
are currently filed against vector-im/element-web rather than this project).

Translation Status

Developer Guide

Platform Targets:

• Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
• WebRTC features (VoIP and Video calling) are only available in Chrome & Firefox.
• Mobile Web is not currently a target platform - instead please use the native
  iOS (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-kit) and Android
  (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk) SDKs.

All code lands on the develop branch - master is only used for stable releases.
Please file PRs against develop!!

Please follow the standard Matrix contributor's guide:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.rst

Please follow the Matrix JS/React code style as per:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/master/code_style.md

Code should be committed as follows:

• All new components: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/tree/master/src/components
• Element-specific components: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/tree/master/src/components
  • In practice, matrix-react-sdk is still evolving so fast that the maintenance
    burden of customising and overriding these components for Element can seriously
    impede development. So right now, there should be very few (if any) customisations for Element.
• CSS: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/tree/master/res/css
• Theme specific CSS & resources: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/tree/master/res/themes

React components in matrix-react-sdk are come in two different flavours:
'structures' and 'views'. Structures are stateful components which handle the
more complicated business logic of the app, delegating their actual presentation
rendering to stateless 'view' components. For instance, the RoomView component
that orchestrates the act of visualising the contents of a given Matrix chat room
tracks lots of state for its child components which it passes into them for visual
rendering via props.

Good separation between the components is maintained by adopting various best
practices that anyone working with the SDK needs to be be aware of and uphold:

• Components are named with upper camel case (e.g. views/rooms/EventTile.js)

• They are organised in a typically two-level hierarchy - first whether the
  component is a view or a structure, and then a broad functional grouping
  (e.g. 'rooms' here)

• After creating a new component you must run yarn reskindex to regenerate
  the component-index.js for the SDK (used in future for skinning)

• The view's CSS file MUST have the same name (e.g. view/rooms/MessageTile.css).
  CSS for matrix-react-sdk currently resides in
  https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/tree/master/src/skins/vector/css/matrix-react-sdk.

• Per-view CSS is optional - it could choose to inherit all its styling from
  the context of the rest of the app, although this is unusual for any but

• Theme specific CSS & resources: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/tree/master/res/themes
  structural components (lacking presentation logic) and the simplest view
  components.

• The view MUST only refer to the CSS rules defined in its own CSS file.
  'Stealing' styling information from other components (including parents)
  is not cool, as it breaks the independence of the components.

• CSS classes are named with an app-specific name-spacing prefix to try to avoid
  CSS collisions. The base skin shipped by Matrix.org with the matrix-react-sdk
  uses the naming prefix "mx_". A company called Yoyodyne Inc might use a
  prefix like "yy_" for its app-specific classes.

• CSS classes use upper camel case when they describe React components - e.g.
  .mx_MessageTile is the selector for the CSS applied to a MessageTile view.

• CSS classes for DOM elements within a view which aren't components are named
  by appending a lower camel case identifier to the view's class name - e.g.
  .mx_MessageTile_randomDiv is how you'd name the class of an arbitrary div
  within the MessageTile view.

• We deliberately use vanilla CSS 3.0 to avoid adding any more magic
  dependencies into the mix than we already have. App developers are welcome
  to use whatever floats their boat however. In future we'll start using
  css-next to pull in features like CSS variable support.

• The CSS for a component can override the rules for child components.
  For instance, .mx_RoomList .mx_RoomTile {} would be the selector to override
  styles of RoomTiles when viewed in the context of a RoomList view.
  Overrides must be scoped to the View's CSS class - i.e. don't just define
  .mx_RoomTile {} in RoomList.css - only RoomTile.css is allowed to define its
  own CSS. Instead, say .mx_RoomList .mx_RoomTile {} to scope the override
  only to the context of RoomList views. N.B. overrides should be relatively
  rare as in general CSS inheritance should be enough.

• Components should render only within the bounding box of their outermost DOM
  element. Page-absolute positioning and negative CSS margins and similar are
  generally not cool and stop the component from being reused easily in
  different places.

Originally matrix-react-sdk followed the Atomic design pattern as per
http://patternlab.io to try to encourage a modular architecture. However, we
found that the grouping of components into atoms/molecules/organisms
made them harder to find relative to a functional split, and didn't emphasise
the distinction between 'structural' and 'view' components, so we backed away
from it.

Github Issues

All issues should be filed under https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues
for now.

Development

Ensure you have the latest LTS version of Node.js installed.

Using yarn instead of npm is recommended. Please see the Yarn 1 install
guide if you do not have it
already. This project has not yet been migrated to Yarn 2, so please ensure
yarn --version shows a version from the 1.x series.

matrix-react-sdk depends on matrix-js-sdk. To make use of changes in the
latter and to ensure tests run against the develop branch of matrix-js-sdk,
you should set up matrix-js-sdk:

git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk
cd matrix-js-sdk
git checkout develop
yarn link
yarn install

Then check out matrix-react-sdk and pull in dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk
cd matrix-react-sdk
git checkout develop
yarn link matrix-js-sdk
yarn install

See the help for yarn link for
more details about this.

Running tests

Ensure you've followed the above development instructions and then:

yarn test

End-to-End tests

Make sure you've got your Element development server running (by doing yarn start in element-web), and then in this project, run yarn run e2etests.
See test/end-to-end-tests/README.md for more information.