XULRunner 1.9 Voodoo

This information is in my talk slides from earlier in the week, but I’m posting it here to make it more accessible.

bsmedberg has written previously about deploying standalone XUL apps based on XULRunner 1.8 and Installing XULRunner applications. This post expands on the latter, and note it is based on my findings (self discovery and nagging Ben a bit) while working with XULRunner 1.9 (trunk).

Getting the GRE Runtime (XULRunner)

2 Options:

1. Download and build from source
2. Download a nightly (trunk) build

Application Structure

Entry Point

The application has to know where to start…
2 Options:

1. In Preferences
   pref(“toolkit.defaultChromeURI“, chrome://mycoolapp/content/start.xul”);

The preferences file an be called anything and should live in defaults/preferences.

2. Override the default command line handler with your own.

application.ini

The application will not install without this file which contains meta information.

[App]
Vendor=My Company
Name=mycoolapp
Version=1.0
BuildID=20051127
Copyright=Copyright (c) 2005 My Company

[Gecko]
MinVersion=1.8
MaxVersion=1.9a1


Registering the GRE

xulrunner -register-global

This updates the registry on Windows (HKLM\Software\mozilla.org\GRE), and writes to /etc/gre.d on Linux. I don’t know about Mac. One thing I noticed on Windows is that if there is a key entry in the registry for a previous version, installed applications (see below) will not launch. I just deleted the old key and things were hunky dorey.

Deployment 1 – Launching from Flat Structure

xulrunner /path/to/my/application/application.ini

This will launch the application directly from where it is unpacked on the system.

Deployment 2 : -install-app

This command can be used on an application distributed in a flat structure, or an XPI archive (or zip or potentially any recognised compressed file type).

Linux : ./xulrunner -install-app /path/to/my/application.xpi
Installed to /usr/lib/<Vendor>/<Name>/
Mac : /Library/Frameworks/XUL.framework/xulrunner-bin -install-app /path/to/my/application.xpi
Installed to /Applications/<Vendor>/<Name>
Windows : xulrunner.exe -install-app /path/to/my/application.xpi
Installed to c:\Program Files\<Vendor>\<Name>\

If I missed anything, please write about it in the comments here. I have a copy of Chatzilla for XULRunner that is out in the wild, and am porting a couple of extensions over myself. I’m sure there is lots of other good stuff out there. Now it is up to extension authors to port over their work, and developers/companies to seriously consider the platform as a serious contender for their application.