499a67f44b
The frontend of the GUI client is written in TypeScript and communicates with the backend via event listeners. Currently, we only have type-safety within either of those parts of the codebase but not across it. The payloads of these events are JSON-encoded. Any change to this interface therefore needs to be applied on either end. To avoid this, we add `tslink` to the GUI client which generates TypeScript interfaces from Rust structs. We still check those into Git into order to make local builds easy (otherwise every dev would have to set `TSLINK_BUILD=true` on their machine). Our Tauri CI build already has a check to ensure the Git workspace isn't modified after building so any changes to these generated files will fail CI. This adds a bit more type-safety to the codebase and makes refactorings on the GUI client easier.
Rust development guide
Firezone uses Rust for all data plane components. This directory contains the Linux and Windows clients, and low-level networking implementations related to STUN/TURN.
We target the last stable release of Rust using rust-toolchain.toml.
If you are using rustup, that is automatically handled for you.
Otherwise, ensure you have the latest stable version of Rust installed.
Reading Client logs
The Client logs are written as JSONL for machine-readability.
To make them more human-friendly, pipe them through jq like this:
cd path/to/logs # e.g. `$HOME/.cache/dev.firezone.client/data/logs` on Linux
cat *.log | jq -r '"\(.time) \(.severity) \(.message)"'
Resulting in, e.g.
2024-04-01T18:25:47.237661392Z INFO started log
2024-04-01T18:25:47.238193266Z INFO GIT_VERSION = 1.0.0-pre.11-35-gcc0d43531
2024-04-01T18:25:48.295243016Z INFO No token / actor_name on disk, starting in signed-out state
2024-04-01T18:25:48.295360641Z INFO null
Benchmarking on Linux
The recommended way for benchmarking any of the Rust components is Linux' perf utility.
For example, to attach to a running application, do:
- Ensure the binary you are profiling is compiled with the
releaseprofile. sudo perf record -g --freq 10000 --pid $(pgrep <your-binary>).- Run the speed test or whatever load-inducing task you want to measure.
sudo perf script > profile.perf- Open profiler.firefox.com and load
profile.perf
Instead of attaching to a process with --pid, you can also specify the path to executable directly.
That is useful if you want to capture perf data for a test or a micro-benchmark.