Cleanup Build Scripts

[pano9000]

Describe Task

We currently have a weird and confusing mixture of ways of how to build our packages.

I can identify

• Desktop Version

  • we have an npm script for building locally, but it also is called in our Github CI actions
    • npm run make-electron which calls
      • tsc and webpack (so far so good)
      • copy-dist.ts (build script that creates a "dist" folder, but)
      • electron-forge (this is supposed to turn the "dist" folder into different packages for different Platforms – it works, but has some issues at the moment as well, see electron-forge's packing includes too many files in its final asar file #5167)
  • this build with node v20 as base (if I am not fully mistaken)

• Server Version

  • we don't seem to have an npm script for this but the Github CI Action is running ./bin/build-server.sh, which is running
    • ./bin/copy-trilium.sh which is doing similar things like copy-dist.ts above, but some additional cleaning
    • ./bin/build-server.sh then does also some clean up like of unneeded files for the Server version
  • we have a Dockerfile
    • has its own build instructions directly in the Dockerfile,
    • which are doing similar things like copy-dist.ts and ./bin/build-server.sh
  • this builds with node v22 as base
  • we have a ./bin/build-docker.sh script that builds above Dockerfile, but first needs to transpile the code locally via tsc???
  • we have a main-docker.yml workflow, which seems to be doing what ./bin/build-docker.sh is doing, but it runs the commands explicitly (i.e. not the script itself -> in other words: we have code duplication)

copy-dists.ts seems to be less "advanced" than copy-trilium.sh in regards to "cleanup", i.e. copy-trilium.sh tries to delete unnecessary test files from npm modules as well.

In ./bin we also have a build.sh script, that references some other build-scripts that are not existing anymore (because they were replaced by using electron-forge), which also calls copy-trilium.sh

We should take a look at all of these and try to clean them up and make them a bit less confusing and duplicated :-)

[pano9000]

TriliumNext/Notes#1225 is partially addressing these issues

[pano9000]

TriliumNext/Notes#1395 was also addressing the issue

and my current work on https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/tree/build_copy-dist-trilium-merge will as well

[eliandoran]

Considering that there's already been three iterations on this, I think we're good.