gjs-require

node-like require for gjs/gnome-shell-extensions

Motivation

We're currently writing an extension (gignx) for the great gnome-shell. But we dislike imports and misc.extensionUtils.getCurrentExtension() because it

feels weird
encourages heavy, long, unreadable and unmaintainable files
makes structuring of your extension unnecessary hard
has no IDE-Support

But for us the most important reason: We need to run code idependently from extension context, so that we can create automated unit-tests.

Important Notes

At this stage this small lib is very very very hacky, under heavy development and still a prove of concept. It is quite likely that gjs-require won't work for your extension. However it works for us here: https://github.com/topa/gignx. Please note that we don't know if you use gjs-require if your extension will be rejected if. Give it a try, and let us know.

How to use

Import gjs-require in the very first line of each script which lies under your extensions root folder, e.g. extension.js, prefs.js or each script that maybe used as entry-point. gjs.require will be injected in global namespace and you can just write require("./lib/bli/bla/blub");

imports.misc.extensionUtils.getCurrentExtension().imports.require;

const Gio = require("gi/Gio");
const Soup = require("gi/Soup");

const Lang = require("lang");

const parseParams = require("misc/params/parse");
const ExtensionUtils = require("misc/extensionUtils");

// Note: lib and foo are folders, any is the filename, Class is a function or a const
const anyClass = require("./lib/foo/any/Class");

// ...

Running tests

You need node and npm (which is part of node). Then run npm install which will install some grunt-tasks locally. You need also to install grunt-cli globally: npm install -g grunt-cli.

grunt watch-test

Quirks