insomnia/DEVELOPMENT.md

# Development Overview

The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of the application architecture.

## Technologies

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.

There are a few more technologies and tools worth mentioning:

- [`React`](https://reactjs.org/) is the library used for all UI components.
- [`styled-components`](https://styled-components.com/) and [`Less`](http://lesscss.org/) are used for styling UI components.
- [`Electron Builder`](https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder) is used to help build, sign, and package Insomnia for distribution.
- [`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.
- [`node-libcurl`](https://github.com/JCMais/node-libcurl) is a Node.js wrapper around the native libcurl library.
- [`CodeMirror`](https://codemirror.net/) is a web-based, extendable, code editor used for highlighting and linting of data formats like JSON, GraphQL, and XML.
- [`Commander.js`](https://github.com/tj/commander.js) is used for building the Inso CLI.

## Project Structure

Insomnia uses [`lerna`](https://lerna.js.org/) to manage multiple npm packages within a single repository. There are currently two package locations:

- `/packages` contains related packages that are consumed by `insomnia` or externally.
- `/plugins` contains plugin packages that are included by default with the application.

## The `insomnia` Main Package

`/packages/insomnia` is the entry point for the app. All other packages are imported from this one.

There are a few notable directories inside it:

- `/main.development.js` Entry for Electron.
- `/src/main` Stuff that runs inside Electron's main process.
- `/src/ui` React components and styling.
- `/src/common` Utilities used across both main and render processes.
- `/src/plugins` Logic around installation and usage of plugins.
- `/src/models` DB models used to store user data.
- `/src/network` Sending requests and performing auth (e.g. OAuth 2).
- `/src/templating` Nunjucks and rendering related code.
- `/src/sync` and `/src/account` Team sync and account stuff.

## Data and State Architecture

Insomnia stores data in a few places:

- A local in-memory NeDB database stores data for data models (requests, folder, workspaces, etc.).
- A local Redux store contains an in-memory copy of all database entities.
- Multiple React Context stores, defined in `/src/ui/context`.

> 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.

## Automated testing

We use [Jest](https://jestjs.io/) and [react-testing-library](https://testing-library.com/docs/react-testing-library) to write our unit tests, and [Playwright](https://github.com/microsoft/playwright) for integration tests.

Unit tests exist alongside the file under test. For example:

- `/src/common/database.js` contains the database business logic
- `/src/common/__tests__/database.test.js` contains the database tests

Unit tests for components follow the same pattern.

The structure for smoke tests is explained in the smoke testing package: [`packages/insomnia-smoke-test`](packages/insomnia-smoke-test).

## Technical Debt

This is just a brief summary of Insomnia's current technical debt.

- Loading large responses (~20 MB) can crash the app on weaker hardware.
- An in-memory duplicate of the local DB is stored in Redux.
- 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.
- Use of `libcurl` means Insomnia can't run in a web browser and can't support bidirectional socket communication.