Modeling App is our take on what a modern modelling experience can be. It is applying several lessons learned in the decades since most major CAD tools came into existence:
- All artifacts—including parts and assemblies—should be represented as human-readable code. At the end of the day, your CAD project should be "plain text"
- This makes version control—which is a solved problem in software engineering—trivial for CAD
- All GUI (or point-and-click) interactions should be actions performed on this code representation under the hood
- This unlocks a hybrid approach to modeling. Whether you point-and-click as you always have or you write your own KCL code, you are performing the same action in Modeling App
- Everything graphics _has_ to be built for the GPU
- Most CAD applications have had to retrofit support for GPUs, but our geometry engine is made for GPUs (primarily Nvidia's Vulkan), getting the order of magnitude rendering performance boost with it
- Make the resource-intensive pieces of an application auto-scaling
- One of the bottlenecks of today's hardware design tools is that they all rely on the local machine's resources to do the hardest parts, which include geometry rendering and analysis. Our geometry engine parallelizes rendering and just sends video frames back to the app (seriously, inspect source, it's just a `<video>` element), and our API will offload analysis as we build it in
We are excited about what a small team of people could build in a short time with our API. We welcome you to try our API, build your own applications, or contribute to ours!
Modeling App is a _hybrid_ user interface for CAD modeling. You can point-and-click to design parts (and soon assemblies), but everything you make is really just [`kcl` code](https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-experiments) under the hood. All of your CAD models can be checked into source control such as GitHub and responsibly versioned, rolled back, and more.
The 3D view in Modeling App is just a video stream from our hosted geometry engine. The app sends new modeling commands to the engine via WebSockets, which returns back video frames of the view within the engine.
We recommend downloading the latest application binary from [our Releases page](https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/releases). If you don't see your platform or architecture supported there, please file an issue.
First, [install Rust via `rustup`](https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install). This project uses a lot of Rust compiled to [WASM](https://webassembly.org/) within it. We always use the latest stable version of Rust, so you may need to run `rustup update stable`. Then, run:
If you're not an KittyCAD employee you won't be able to access the dev environment, you should copy everything from `.env.production` to `.env.development` to make it point to production instead, then when you navigate to `localhost:3000` the easiest way to sign in is to paste `localStorage.setItem('TOKEN_PERSIST_KEY', "your-token-from-https://zoo.dev/account/api-tokens")` replacing the with a real token from https://zoo.dev/account/api-tokens of course, then navigate to localhost:3000 again. Note that navigating to `localhost:3000/signin` removes your token so you will need to set the token again.
The Copilot LSP plugin in the editor requires a Zoo API token to run. In production, we authenticate this with a token via cookie in the browser and device auth token in the desktop environment, but this token is inaccessible in the dev browser version because the cookie is considered "cross-site" (from `localhost` to `dev.zoo.dev`). There is an optional environment variable called `VITE_KC_DEV_TOKEN` that you can populate with a dev token in a `.env.development.local` file to not check it into Git, which will use that token instead of other methods for the LSP service.
When you open the PR copy the change log from the output of the `./make-release.sh` script into the description of the PR.
**Important:** Pull request title needs to be prefixed with `Cut release v` to build in release mode and a few other things to test in the best context possible, the intent would be for instance to have `Cut release v1.2.3` for the `v1.2.3` release candidate.
The PR may then serve as a place to discuss the human-readable changelog and extra QA. The `make-release.sh` tool suggests a changelog for you too to be used as PR description, just make sure to delete lines that are not user facing.
Manually test against this [list](https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/issues/3588) across Windows, MacOS, Linux and posting results as comments in the Cut Release PR.
The other `ci` output in Cut Release PRs is `updater-test`, because we don't have a way to test this fully automated, we have a semi-automated process. Download updater-test zip file, install the app, run it, expect an updater prompt to a dummy v0.99.99, install it and check that the app comes back at that version (on both macOS and Windows).
This will kick the `create-release` action, that creates a _Draft_ release out of this Cut Release PR merge after less than a minute, with the new version as title and Cut Release PR as description.
Head over to https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/releases, the draft release corresponding to the merged Cut Release PR should show up at the top as _Draft_. Click on it, verify the content, and hit _Publish_.
**Gotcha**: running the docker container with a mismatched image against your `./node_modules/playwright` will cause a failure. Make sure the versions are matched and up to date.
However, if you want a debugger I recommend using VSCode and the `playwright` extension, as the above command is a cruder debugger that steps into every function call which is annoying.
With the extension you can set a breakpoint after `waitForDefaultPlanesVisibilityChange` in order to skip app loading, then the vscode debugger's "step over" is much better for being able to stay at the right level of abstraction as you debug the code.
If you want to limit to a single browser use `--project="webkit"` or `firefox`, `Google Chrome`
Or comment out browsers in `playwright.config.ts`.
note chromium has encoder compat issues which is why were testing against the branded 'Google Chrome'
You may consider using the VSCode extension, it's useful for running individual threads, but some some reason the "record a test" is locked to chromium with we can't use. A work around is to us the CI `yarn playwright codegen -b wk --load-storage ./store localhost:3000`
However because much of our tests involve clicking in the stream at specific locations, it's code-gen looks `await page.locator('video').click();` when really we need to use a pixel coord, so I think it's of limited use.
yarn test abstractSyntaxTree -t "unexpected closed curly brace" --silent=false
```
Which will run our suite of [Vitest unit](https://vitest.dev/) and [React Testing Library E2E](https://testing-library.com/docs/react-testing-library/intro/) tests, in interactive mode by default.
When you see the CI CD fail on jobs you may wonder three things
- Do I have a bug in my code?
- Is the test flaky?
- Is there a bug in `main`?
To answer these questions the following commands will give you confidence to locate the issue.
#### Static Analysis
Part of the CI CD pipeline performs static analysis on the code. Use the following commands to mimic the CI CD jobs.
The following set of commands should get us closer to one and done commands to instantly retest issues.
```
yarn test-setup
```
> Gotcha, are packages up to date and is the wasm built?
```
yarn tsc
yarn fmt-check
yarn lint
yarn test:unit:local
```
> Gotcha: Our unit tests have integration tests in them. You need to run a localhost server to run the unit tests.
#### E2E Tests
**Playwright Browser**
These E2E tests run in a browser (without electron).
There are tests that are skipped if they are ran in a windows OS or Linux OS. We can use playwright tags to implement test skipping.
Breaking down the command `yarn test:playwright:browser:chrome:windows`
- The application is `playwright`
- The runtime is a `browser`
- The specific `browser` is `chrome`
- The test should run in a `windows` environment. It will skip tests that are broken or flaky in the windows OS.
```
yarn test:playwright:browser:chrome
yarn test:playwright:browser:chrome:windows
yarn test:playwright:browser:chrome:ubuntu
```
**Playwright Electron**
These E2E tests run in electron. There are tests that are skipped if they are ran in a windows, linux, or macos environment. We can use playwright tags to implement test skipping.
```
yarn test:playwright:electron:local
yarn test:playwright:electron:windows:local
yarn test:playwright:electron:macos:local
yarn test:playwright:electron:ubuntu:local
```
> Why does it say local? The CI CD commands that run in the pipeline cannot be ran locally. A single command will not properly setup the testing environment locally.
The tests are broken into snapshot tests and non-snapshot tests, and they run in that order, they automatically commit new snap shots, so if you see an image commit check it was an intended change. If we have non-determinism in the snapshots such that they are always committing new images, hopefully this annoyance makes us fix them asap, if you notice this happening let Kurt know. But for the odd occasion `git reset --hard HEAD~ && git push -f` is your friend.
If your tests fail, click through to the action and see that the tests failed on a line that includes `await page.getByTestId('loading').waitFor({ state: 'detached' })`, this means the test fail because the stream never started. It's you choice if you want to re-run the test, or ignore the failure.
We run on ubuntu and macos, because safari doesn't work on linux because of the dreaded "no RTCPeerConnection variable" error. But linux runs first and then macos for the same reason that we limit the number of parallel tests to 1 because we limit stream connections per user, so tests would start failing we if let them run together.
If something fails on CI you can download the artifact, unzip it and then open `playwright-report/data/<UUID>.zip` with https://trace.playwright.dev/ to see what happened.
#### Getting started writing a playwright test in our app
Besides following the instructions above and using the playwright docs, our app is weird because of the whole stream thing, which means our testing is weird. Because we've just figured out this stuff and therefore docs might go stale quick here's a 15min vid/tutorial