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name run-editor
description Launch the OpenNoodl Electron editor and inspect it headlessly — evaluate JS in the renderer, stream console output and uncaught exceptions, capture screenshots, query the DOM. Use whenever asked to run, start, debug, or screenshot the editor, or to confirm a change works in the real app rather than only in tests.

Running and debugging the OpenNoodl editor

The editor is an Electron app. You can drive and inspect it entirely from the terminal — you do not need to look at the window, and you do not need macOS screen-recording permission.

Launch

npm run dev:debug                    # full stack + CDP endpoint, logs to .logs/dev.log
npm run dev:debug -- --quiet         # same, file logging only
npm run dev:debug -- --inspect-main  # also open a main-process inspector on :9229

Always launch in the background and wait for the compile — it takes 60-90s:

nohup npm run dev:debug -- --quiet > /dev/null 2>&1 &
until grep -q "launching Electron" .logs/dev.log; do sleep 15; done
sleep 30   # renderer bundle still has to load

npm run dev also works and now behaves correctly, but has no CDP endpoint.

Inspect

npm run cdp -- health                     # is React mounted? one-shot verdict
npm run cdp -- services                   # are the dev servers and builds up?
npm run cdp -- eval "document.title"      # run JS in the renderer
npm run cdp -- console 20000              # stream console + uncaught exceptions
npm run cdp -- screenshot shot.png        # PNG via the compositor
npm run cdp -- dom ".launcher" html       # innerText or outerHTML of a selector
npm run cdp -- wait ".project-list" 30000 # block until a selector appears
npm run cdp -- click "button.create"      # real trusted click, React handlers fire
npm run cdp -- type "input[name=x]" "hi"  # focus + insert text, fires onChange
npm run cdp -- reload                     # reload, e.g. to catch startup errors
npm run cdp -- targets                    # list CDP targets

Start with health. It reports whether the mount point has children. A window that opens but renders nothing is the failure mode this app is prone to, and health catches it in one call.

Two renderers. The editor and the project preview are separate windows, so separate CDP targets. Every command takes --target:

npm run cdp -- health --target=viewer            # the preview window
npm run cdp -- screenshot preview.png --target=viewer

--target=editor is the default. The viewer target only exists while a preview is running; asking for it otherwise is an error rather than a silent fall back to the editor.

click and type go through Input.dispatchMouseEvent / Input.insertText, not synthetic DOM events, so React's handlers, focus and :active behave as they do for a real user. el.click() from eval bypasses most of that — prefer these.

Startup exceptions are captured automatically: dev:debug attaches to each page as it appears and writes [renderer:exception] lines into .logs/dev.log, so a boot crash is in the log before you get there. console + reload is still the way to watch them live.

Screenshots — use CDP, not screencapture

npm run cdp -- screenshot renders through the browser compositor. It needs no OS permission, works when the window is behind others, and covers everything inside the window — which is nearly all of an Electron app.

A black rectangle from macOS screencapture means a missing permission, not a crashed app. macOS gates screen capture behind Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, and the permission belongs to the capturing process — your terminal or VS Code — not to OpenNoodl. The desktop and dock still render normally, so the result looks exactly like an app that failed to paint. This has already cost one session several steps chasing a crash that never happened.

If you have a black frame and are unsure which it is, run npm run cdp -- health. reactMounted: true means the app is fine and your capture path is not.

Reach for the native path only for things outside the renderer — the OS window frame, native menus, native dialogs, multi-window layout. That needs the permission granted to Terminal / VS Code (then restart that app), and Playwright's _electron driver is the better tool if you need it repeatedly.

Read screenshots back with the Read tool. A blank frame from CDP is a real failure.

Logs

.logs/dev.log holds everything: viewer, cloud runtime, editor main process, and the renderer console (mirrored into main process stdout in dev). Grep it rather than scrolling:

grep -iE "error|exception|failed" .logs/dev.log | grep -viE "sass|deprecat"

Services: web server on 8574, cloud functions on 8577, renderer dev server on 8080, CDP on 9222, main-process inspector on 9229 when asked for. npm run cdp -- services probes all of them, plus the freshness of the viewer and cloud-runtime builds in src/external — those are webpack watch builds rather than servers, so they have no port to probe.

Traps specific to this repo

ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE — VS Code sets this in integrated terminals and the extension host. With it set, the Electron binary boots as plain Node, require('electron').app is undefined, and the app dies before opening a window. scripts/start.ts and the webpack dev config both strip it now, but if you invoke electron yourself, strip it: env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE ....

Stale bundles. Two entry points are built artefacts:

  • src/editor/index.bundle.js (renderer) — only loaded when process.env.devMode !== 'yes'. main.js sets that in dev so the webpack dev server is used instead. If you ever see production React in a dev stack trace, the app is running the stale disk bundle.
  • src/main/main.bundle.js (main process) — the actual Electron entry. scripts/start.ts rebuilds it on every dev launch. Before that existed, main process edits did nothing in dev.

Both are gitignored now, and npm run check:artefacts fails if they are ever committed again — a tracked bundle is what let a months-old build masquerade as source. If a change appears to have no effect, suspect a stale bundle before suspecting the change.

Single instance. The app takes a single-instance lock; a second launch exits with "Noodl is already running". Kill the old one first:

pkill -f "OpenNoodl/node_modules/electron/dist"
pkill -f "lerna exec"

Use those precise patterns. pkill -f Electron also matches VS Code, Discord and any other Electron app the user is running.

Tests

npm run test:editor (windowed) and npm run test:ci (headless) run the Jasmine suite inside Electron. Both exit non-zero on failure. See dev-docs/reference/DEBUG-INFRASTRUCTURE.md.