Activity Stream Development Guide

Contents of this guide

Installation, set-up, and other basics (this page)
Writing unit tests
Adding new Telemetry (user and performance metrics)
Reading/changing Firefox prefs
Adding new sections

How to try Activity Stream

If you just want to try out the current version of Activity Stream in Firefox, you can install Firefox Nightly or any version of Firefox >= 57.0. If you still don't see activity stream, go to about:config, and make sure the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled pref is set to true.

Source code and submitting pull requests

A copy of the code in the root directory of this repository is exported to Mozilla central on a regular basis, which can be found at browser/components/newtab. Keep in mind that some of these files are generated, so if you intend on editing any files, you should do so in the Github version.

Pull requests should be sent against the master branch of https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream, NOT against Mozilla central.

Prerequisites for development

Operating system and software

The Activity Stream development environment is designed to work on Mac and Linux. If you need to develop on Windows, you might want to reach out on IRC (#activity-stream) if you run into any problems.

You will also need to install:

Node.js 7+ (On Mac, the best way to install Node.js is to use the install link on the Node.js homepage)
npm (packaged with Node.js)

Activity Stream Github repository

You will need to to clone Activity Stream to a local directory from the master branch of our Github repository: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream

git clone https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream.git

Mozilla Central

You will need a local copy of Mozilla Central in a directory named mozilla-central. Check the detail of how to get and build Mozilla Central in Building Firefox. That directory should be a sibling of your local activity-stream directory (like so):

/
  mozilla-central/
  activity-stream/

Check out these docs on artifact builds for instructions about how to download and configure Mozilla Central if you have never done so before.

To build Firefox way faster, you should definitely enable Artifact builds. To do that, create a .mozconfig (or mozconfig) file in the root of your mozilla-central directory and add the following to it:

# Automatically download and use compiled C++ components:
ac_add_options --enable-artifact-builds

# Write build artifacts to:
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-frontend

Building

Install required dependencies by running npm install.
To build Activity Stream, run npm run buildmc from the root of the activity-stream directory. This will build the js and css files and copy them into the browser/components/newtab directory inside Mozilla Central.
Build and run Firefox from the mozilla-central directory by running ./mach build && ./mach run.

Continuous development / debugging

Running npm run startmc will start a process that watches files in activity-stream and continuously builds/copies changes to mozilla-central. You will still need to rebuild Firefox (./mach build) if you change .jsm files.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This task will add inline source maps to help with debugging, which changes the memory footprint. Do not use the startmc task for profiling or performance testing!

Unit Tests

Run npm run testmc to run the unit tests with karma/mocha. The source code for these tests can be found in system-addon/test/unit/.

We have a detailed write-up on Activity Stream unit testing. This is an important read, as there are significant JavaScript differences when writing Firefox add-on code that must be taken into consideration.

Our build process will run unit tests and code coverage tools automatically. Make that all tests pass, and that you are not responsible for unduly decreasing the overall code coverage percentage.

If you see any missing test coverage, you can inspect the coverage report by running npm run testmc && npm run debugcoverage.

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