target-browser

Browser Target of Deltachat desktop

For now this is only meant for development and debugging the frontend. So not all features will work. It is not meant for end users.

Future ideas:

In the future someone could porbably use this to make a deltachat webclient that could use the deltachat installation on android for example.

You could even host it on a raspberry pi in your local network or on your homeserver and connect to it from every device.

How to use this

Generate your own self signed certifacate

Install rust over rustup.rs and then cargo install rustls-cert-gen.

Then run this to generate a self signed certificate:

rustls-cert-gen -o data/certificate

It's important to use HTTPS, otherwise the communication between backend and frontend is not encrypted/protected,

After that you can start the server with this:

Linux / MacOS:

WEB_PASSWORD="my_password" pnpm run start

Windows (Powershell):

$env:WEB_PASSWORD="my_password"
pnpm run start

or add a .env file with the password see env.example

From the root of this repo you can start the server with

pnpm start:browser

Then point your browser to https://localhost:3000 and accept the locally signed certificate to continue.

If you get an "The connection was reset"-Error, then you have likely forgotten to use https instead of http.

Limitations

• Only basic features are implemented
• There are only notifications if the tab is open, if no tab is open there are no notifications, because the code for it is run in the frontend.

Known broken things

• Image Cropper is broken because accesing tmp files directly isn't implemented. Suggestion: handle image preview in cache or memory.
• Sometimes it takes long to start.

There is no browser api for that

• Dragging out files
• Tray icon

Not implemented

• Stickers
• Webxdc
• HTML emails
• and more...