Build And Run

Building and Running poi

Launching Electron — the one trap that always bites

ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1 is inherited from VSCode-spawned and Claude Code shells and silently turns Electron into plain Node — require('electron') then fails and app.getVersion crashes. Always clear it:

env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE npx electron .

poi also holds a single-instance lock: if the user's own poi is running, a launched instance exits with "Another instance is running" (their process may be named poi.exe, not electron.exe). Kill test instances with taskkill //F //IM electron.exe — that never touches the packaged poi.exe.

Babel 8 constraints — easy to regress, do not undo

poi migrated to Babel 8 on 2026-07-16 (docs/babel8-migration.md has the full log).

• @babel/register can never come back. register@8 compiles in a node:worker_threads worker unconditionally, and Electron renderer processes cannot create Node workers (nodeIntegrationInWorker does not help). poi registers the hook in renderers (views/env.ts, assets/js/plugin-preload.js), so it uses the local in-process babel-hook.js (pirates + transformSync + @cspotcode/source-map-support), fed by babel-register.config.js (configFile-based; options must stay simple / structured-cloneable-ish).
• babel-plugin-styled-components is shimmed in babel.config.js (styledComponentsBabel8Shim): it no-ops assertVersion(7) and strips inherits: syntax-jsx. npm overrides in package.json align its @babel/core peer and @babel/plugin-syntax-jsx dep. Remove all three only when upstream ships Babel 8 support.
• preset-react must stay scoped away from plain .ts (config overrides with exclude: /\.ts$/): Babel 8's preset-typescript no longer strips the JSX parser plugin for .ts, so JSX-everywhere breaks generic arrows like <T>(x) => x.
• onlyRemoveTypeImports: false must stay on preset-typescript: otherwise Babel 8 keeps a side-effect require() for type-only imports, crashing plugins that import types from tsc-only specifiers.
• modules: 'commonjs' must stay explicit in preset-env: Babel 8 keeps ESM when the caller declares nothing, and build/compile-to-js.es is such a caller. It must also keep threading assumptions and overrides through — it destructures the config.
• declare global { var x } plus a module-level const x in the same file breaks Babel 8's parser (tsc accepts it). Such blocks live in lib/globals.d.ts and views/env-parts/globals.d.ts — do not move them back.
• The assumptions block is loose-mode-equivalent only with enumerableModuleMeta: true, which the official Babel migration list omits.
• index.html installs the require hook in an inline <script> (before require('./views/env')). When auditing hook call sites, grep *.html too — a .js/.ts/.es-scoped grep misses it.

glob v13 on Windows

poi migrated glob ^7 -> ^13 on 2026-07-28. glob v9+ treats \ as an **escape character on all platforms**, so patterns built from ROOT or path.join() (backslashes on Windows) match nothing — silently, with no error.

Every glob call site must pass { windowsPathsNoEscape: true }. Returned paths stay backslash-absolute, identical to v7 output, so downstream path handling is unaffected.

Other v13 API changes already applied: no default export (import { glob } / { globSync }), no callback form (glob() returns a Promise, so promisify(glob) and new Promise(res => glob(p, cb)) were removed). The old callback form swallowed errors and yielded []; the promise form rejects, so .catch(() => []) preserves that in views/services/plugin-manager/.

Failure mode to watch for: a missing flag shows up as "no plugins found" or "i18n didn't load", never as an exception.

gulp build

• gulp build archives from git HEAD — commit before building, or it builds stale sources.
• Stage-2 npm ci --only=production may fail locally if the machine lacks a VC++ toolset (electron-drag-click needs node-gyp). npm then rolls back and leaves app_compiled/node_modules empty. The gulp task still exits 0, because runScript in build/utils.ts ignores child exit codes — so a green run does not prove success. Release artifacts are built in GitHub CI where the toolchain exists, so this is environmental.
• To verify artifacts locally anyway: (1) check the stage-1 compile output — no .es / .ts / .tsx outside __tests__ / __mocks__, package.json rewritten with latestCommit; and (2) smoke-boot it with env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE npx electron app_compiled. Node resolution walks up to the repo's own node_modules, so the empty artifact node_modules does not block the boot.