rusty-bootstrapper

An alternative, Rust-based bootstrapper for the SKCraft launcher.

Currently in development. It does work but I don't recommend you distribute this to your users.

Note: This bootstrapper is not a direct drop-in replacement for the original bootstrapper. It works differently & it uses different data directory locations.

why?

The problem with the Java bootstrapper is that it can silently fail when the user has an incorrect Java version. Most end-users don't know what version of Java they have; even Minecraft players may not know because Mojang's modern launcher bundles Java.

For this reason both the Java bootstrapper and launcher target Java 6, in order to have the highest chance of working. But the projects can also break on too new Java versions, when not updated.

This project tries to fix that in a couple ways:

• Written in Rust, has no hard dependency on the Java runtime
• Uses native platform UI kits wherever possible
  • winapi on Windows, Cocoa on Mac
  • zenity/kdialog command line tools on Linux
• Reports errors via dialog wherever possible to avoid silent failure
• Reports when the launcher exits with an error
• Can verify Java version and report incompatibilities (TODO, some implementation is done)

building

The default config file lives at src/settings.json. You need to edit this file:

• update_url should be a HTTP URL that returns an update JSON.
• org_name should be the name of your organization, e.g. "My Company"
• app_name should be the name of the app, e.g. "My Company Launcher"

Platform	Launcher Data Location
Windows	%APPDATA%/My Company/My Company Launcher/data
Mac	$HOME/Library/Application Support/My-Company.My-Company-Launcher
Linux	$XDG_DATA_HOME/mycompanylauncher

The update JSON returned from update_url should look like:

{
  "url": "http://your.website/launcher-4.0.0.jar",
  "version": "4.0.0"
}

Once you've edited the configuration simply run:

cargo build --release
python3 append_data.py target/release/rusty-bootstrapper

On Windows, you must add .exe to the end of the python script:

python3 append_data.py target/release/rusty-bootstrapper.exe

(The append_data.py step is simple helper script that appends your settings to the end of the binary, which is picked up later by the bootstrapper. This will be a helpful tool rather than a Python script in the future.)

The executable will be in target/release/.

Note that these instructions only build an executable for your current platform. Methods for building for multiple platforms will be available on release.