Development and Building

This document provides instructions for developers interested in building, testing, or contributing to wacli, a command-line interface for WhatsApp focusing on message history synchronization, offline search, and communication features.

Getting Started

Before you begin, ensure you have Go (version 1.20 or later is recommended) and pnpm (or npm/yarn if you prefer) installed on your system.

Local Build

To build wacli locally, navigate to the project's root directory and use the following Go command:

This command compiles the Go source code and places the executable in the ./dist/ directory as wacli.

Understanding the sqlite_fts5 Build Tag

The -tags sqlite_fts5 flag is crucial. It enables support for SQLite's FTS5 (Full-Text Search) extension.

• With sqlite_fts5: wacli will utilize FTS5 for much faster and more advanced message searching capabilities (e.g., snippet generation, ranking). This is the recommended build configuration for optimal search performance.
• Without sqlite_fts5: If you omit this tag, wacli will still build, but its search functionality will fall back to using standard SQL LIKE queries, which are significantly slower and less powerful for full-text search.

After building, you can run the executable to see its available commands:

For convenience, the package.json includes a build script that wraps this command:

And a start script to build and run:

Testing

wacli includes a suite of tests to ensure its functionality. There are two primary categories of tests: general Go tests and tests specifically for the FTS5 implementation.

• Run all general Go tests:

• Run tests that require FTS5 support:

The package.json also provides scripts for running tests:

• Run all tests (both general and FTS5-specific):

• Run general Go tests:

• Run FTS5-specific tests:

Code Quality

Maintaining code quality is important for wacli. The project uses standard Go tools for linting and formatting.

• Linting (checking for common errors and suspicious constructs):
  This command checks for potential issues in your code. The package.json provides a shortcut:

• Formatting (automatically fixing code style issues):
  This command rewrites all Go source files in the current directory and its subdirectories to use the standard Go format. The package.json provides a shortcut:

• Checking formatting (identifying files that need formatting):
  This command lists all files that are not correctly formatted. The package.json provides a shortcut to check and fail if issues are found:

Contributing

We welcome contributions to wacli! If you're interested in adding new features, fixing bugs, or improving documentation, please feel free to:

1. Open an issue to discuss your ideas or report bugs.
2. Fork the repository and submit a pull request with your changes.

For a deeper understanding of the project's architecture and design choices, please refer to the comprehensive design notes in docs/spec.md (not provided in this response, but referenced as per instructions).