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. Electron provides a Chromium runtime for the Insomnia web app to run inside of, as well as additional tools to provide access to operating system features.

There are a few more technologies and tools worth mentioning:

React is the library used for all UI components
Less is used for styling UI components
Electron Builder is used to help build, sign, and package Insomnia for distribution.
Flow is used for adding types to the codebase. Not everything is Flow but all new code should be typed with Flow.
Webpack is the bundler used to compile the JS/Less/babel/etc libcurl library that Insomnia uses to make requests. Libcurl is the HTTP client of choice because it allows the deepest amount of debuggability and control of HTTP requests.
nedb a local in-memory database
node-libcurl is a NodeJS wrapper around the native
Codemirror is a web-based, extendable, code editor used for highlighting and linting of data formats like JSON, GraphQL, and XML.

Project Structure

Insomnia uses lerna to manage multiple npm packages within a single repository. There are currently two package locations:

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

The `insomnia-app` Main Package

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

There are a few notable directories inside of it:

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

Eventually, Redux could/should be removed, which would both reduce memory overhead and simplify the codebase. NeDB should essentially replace it

Technical Debt

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

Loading large responses (~20MB) can crash the app on weaker hardware
Redux stores an in-memory duplicate of the local DB, unnecessarily doubling memory usage. Moving forward, Redux shouldn't need to be considered much and may be able to be removed eventually.
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 templating/autocomplete/etc are actually Codemirror 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

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