Tabulon

A cross-platform desktop app for playing 125 board games, built with Tauri 2 and the Jocly JS library. A migration of JoclyBoard (Electron) to Tauri.

Main features: 2D/3D boards, human vs AI play, clocked games, game import/export, per-game rules, favorites and templates, any number of simultaneous games, English/French UI (locale detected from the system).

For the internal architecture (window inventory, JS ⇄ Rust protocol, satellite-window events), see ARCHITECTURE.md.

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Prerequisites

• Rust (stable) + Cargo — via rustup

• Node.js ≥ 20 (npm)

• Tauri CLI: cargo install tauri-cli --version "^2"

• ffmpeg (only needed for the in-app video recording feature)

• Linux only — system packages for Tauri's WebView (Debian/Ubuntu):

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file \
    libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev

  See the official Tauri prerequisites page for other distros / macOS / Windows.

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Building Jocly

Tabulon does not depend on Jocly through npm. Jocly is built separately from jocly2, then its dist/ output is copied as-is to the root of this repo (tabulon/dist/, not node_modules/):

git clone https://github.com/fhoudebert/jocly2.git
cd jocly2
npm install
npm run build          # runs `gulp build --prod`, produces jocly2/dist/

# copy the result into this repo, next to app/ and src-tauri/
cp -r dist /path/to/tabulon/dist

Rebuild and re-copy dist/ whenever you update jocly2. Tauri merges app/ and dist/ at the virtual web root (frontendDist in tauri.conf.json), so browser/jocly.js and games/** resolve at runtime.

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Building Tabulon

From the tabulon/ root, once dist/ is in place:

# 1. Root dependencies (Tauri CLI wrapper scripts)
npm install

# 2. Frontend dependencies (@tauri-apps/*, jquery, photonkit, jsdom for tests)
npm --prefix app install

# 3. Run in development mode
npm run dev            # equivalent to: cargo tauri dev

# 4. Production build
npm run build          # bundles in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

After changing files in app/ (or deleting/adding any frontend file), remove src-tauri/target/ before rebuilding: stale embedded assets are the most common cause of "my change has no effect" / broken-page symptoms.

Running the tests

Integration test suites live in tests/. They exercise the real frontend JS against the real HTML in jsdom, with only window.__TAURI__ mocked, plus the real Jocly dist/ for game data:

npm test               # runs every tests/test-*.mjs and summarizes
node tests/test-i18n.mjs   # or any single suite

Prerequisites: dist/ in place (see above) and npm --prefix app install (jsdom). The runner checks both and tells you what is missing.

Useful commands

# Type/borrow-check the Rust backend without a full build
cargo check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml

# Regenerate app icons from a source PNG (square, ≥1024×1024)
cargo tauri icon path/to/source.png

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Project layout

tabulon/
├── app/            Frontend: one HTML/JS pair per window (hub, play,
│                   clock, history, …) + shared modules (tabulon-rpc.js,
│                   tabulon-i18n.js, tauri-bridge.js, tabulon.css)
├── dist/           Jocly build output — see "Building Jocly" above
├── src-tauri/      Rust backend: window management, store, favorites/
│                   templates, video recording — no game logic
├── tests/          Integration suites (jsdom) + run-tests.mjs runner
└── package.json    Root npm scripts (dev / build / test)

Game logic runs in play.html (Jocly attached in an iframe); satellite windows (history, clock, players, …) are pure views talking to it over Tauri events. Details in ARCHITECTURE.md.

License

AGPL-3.0 (see package.json).