Insomnia is a desktop application built on top of [Electron](http://electronjs.org/). Electron provides a Chromium runtime for the Insomnia web app to run inside, as well as additional tools to provide access to operating system features.
- [`libcurl`](https://curl.se/libcurl/) is the library that Insomnia uses to make requests. We used libcurl as our HTTP client of choice because it allows the deepest amount of debuggability and control of HTTP requests.
- [`NeDB`](https://github.com/louischatriot/nedb) a local in-memory database.
- [`CodeMirror`](https://codemirror.net/) is a web-based, extendable, code editor used for highlighting and linting of data formats like JSON, GraphQL, and XML.
Insomnia uses [`npm workspaces`](https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/using-npm/workspaces?v=true) to manage multiple npm packages within a single repository. There are currently the following package locations:
1.`insomnia-inso` uses monorepo references to import `insomnia` and `insomnia-testing` to expose `getSendRequestCallbackMemDb` and `generate`, `runTests`, `runTestsCli` respectively
1.`packages/insomnia-inso/dist/index.js` is transpiled with esbuild to commonjs
- inso bundles almost the entire renderer, react components included, meaning that although we are intending to use this code in node we are bundling it using rules intended for browsers and stubs electron.
- node-libcurl present bundling issues because it needs to re-download a different version from npm each time you want to work on either insomnia or inso.
- nunjucks codepaths haven't been touched in a long time, they need some love in order to be able to understand how to make them composable.
- create a database package with nunjucks templating and have both insomnia and inso use it with project references, use node-libcurl directly, that way we don't need to stub electorn and only import the code we use.
> Note: NeDB is officially unmaintained (even for critical security bugs) and was last published in February 2016. Due to this, we hope to move away from it, however doing so is tricky because of how deeply tied it is to our architecture.
- Bundling `libcurl` (native module) has caused many weeks of headaches trying to get builds working across Windows, Mac, and Linux. More expertise here is definitely needed.
- All input fields that support features like templating or code completion are actually [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/6/) instances. This isn't really debt, but may affect things going forward.
