Any plans to support capacitor?

[vially]

Description

I would like to start a discussion regarding the possibility to add code-push support to capacitor? I understand that this may not be the right place to ask this question because this repository is for cordova, but I think capacitor and cordova are similiar enough that it might make sense to start a discussion in here.

Background

We're currently in the process of migrating an app from cordova to capacitor and the lack of support for code-push in capacitor is one of our blocking issues.

Our short-term plan is to fork cordova-plugin-code-push and replace all the cordova plugin calls with their capacitor equivalents. We already started going down this path. But we've just got started and it's already obvious that our fork will diverge pretty quickly from upstream which will make it hard to keep our fork in sync (and will make it harder to try to upstream our work).

I would like to start a discussion about this and see if you guys have any interest in supporting capacitor, or do you think it would be better to leave this to the community to figure it out?

And if you do have any interest in supporting it, do you think it makes sense to have separate plugins (and repositories) for cordova and capacitor? Or would it be preferable to have one plugin which delegates the underlying platform calls to a library (which doesn't exist yet) which abstracts away the differences between cordova and capacitor?

Another approach could be to leverage the capacitor support for cordova plugins.

We've tried this approach (on Android) and it didn't seem to work, but let's just suppose that it could be fixed.

My main concern with this approach is that code-push relies on cordova-plugin-file for filesystem access. And cordova-plugin-file overwrites the browser's FileReader in a backwards incompatible way which is causing all kinds of issues (related issues: pannellum, ionic-native, ionic2-app-base).

So we'd really like to avoid having cordova-plugin-file as a dependency and that wouldn't be possible with this approach.

[Zakeelm]

Hey there!

We're definitely keep an eye on Capacitor and will continue to do so. As of now, we don't currently have plans to support Capacitor. But, if we see this is something people are interested in we'll definitely further investigate the possibilities of supporting it in the future. 🙂. I'm going to close this for now.

[TylerAHolden]

@vially what did you guys end up doing? I'd like to know because I am in the same boat here wanting to make the switch to capacitor.

[vially]

@NG-tylerholden We forked cordova-plugin-code-push and rewrote parts of it to make it compatible with capacitor, but we didn't actually finish the job as our priorities have shifted a bit in the meantime.

I would say it's around 75% done and we still plan on finishing it, we just haven't found the time to do it yet (we could use some help from the community to finish the job though 😉).

On a side note, we did migrate to capacitor and it's been a good experience so far compared to cordova. But unfortunately we lost code-push in the process, so we're back to old-school app store releases for now.

[richtoulouse]

@vially Are you still needing help on porting the Cordova code push plugin to Capacitor?

[vially]

Sure, any kind of help is more than welcome. We're still planning on finishing it (if someone else doesn't beat us to it), we just didn't have much time to work on it lately.

[petrtravnik]

Is there any working solution at the moment?

[digaus]

Yeah would really like to switch to capacitor foe easier including of custom native code. But currently code push is preventzing this.

[dylanvdmerwe]

Code push is also a blocker for us to move to Capacitor.

[jmellicker]

@vially I would also like to see hot code push working for Capacitor, happy to help move it forward, could you point me to your work so far?

[vially]

@jmellicker That's awesome! 👍

I haven't touched this code in almost a year now so I had to spend some time over the weekend to try to get up to speed on what the latest status is and what should be the next steps.

As a very high-level overview, the code-push cordova/capacitor plugin consists of three main parts:

• [1] the cross-platform javascript/typescript code
• [2] the native Android code
• [3] the native iOS code

So far, I've mostly focused on refactoring and rewriting [1] and [2]. The work on [3] hasn't been started yet.

I think the big chunk of work for refactoring [1] and [2] has already been done (but there are still a couple of parts missing which are usually marked with TODO comments in the code). So most of the remaining work is on filling these missing parts and refactoring [3] the native iOS code.

I've only taken a cursory look at the native iOS code, but I think most of the work involves rewriting CodePush.m and some parts of CodePushReportingManager.m by getting rid of the Cordova calls and replacing them with their Capacitor equivalents.

However, most of the work I've mentioned so far only covers the almost mechanical work of refactoring the Cordova calls to Capacitor calls. Once these are done there might be some additional work required originating from underlying platform differences between Capacitor and Cordova. I'm not sure what those might be, so let's investigate once we see them.

I hope this should give you a rough overview of what the current status is. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any additional questions (either directly or by opening issues on our forked repository linked below).

Judging by the reactions in this thread and other similar ones it looks like there's definitely some demand for getting CodePush support in Capacitor. So I'd love if we could work together to ship this faster.

Links to code repositories

• capacitor-codepush
• capacitor-plugin-file-transfer (Capacitor equivalent for cordova-plugin-file-transfer). Only Android support has been implemented so far. But it looks like there's a new capacitor-file-transfer plugin. Maybe we could use that one instead?

[D34THWINGS]

Hey @vially! Where do you stand on your rewrite? Can we help?