Unable to open Actual Budget app via ScriptKit

[JamesHenry]

As per our twitter discussion.

• https://actualbudget.com/ is an electron desktop app
• in order to interact with your local data via its API, the app needs to be open
• I have a scriptkit implementation of my API logic, but I cannot get scriptkit to open the app for me successfully

You can open the app via e.g. the VSCode terminal with:

open -a Actual.app

But if you create a minimal scriptkit script:

open-actual.js

exec(`open -a "Actual.app"`); // bounces for a sec, doesn't open

// exec(`open -a "Spotify.app"`); // other apps I have tried seem to work fine...

[jlongster]

Thanks for looking into this!

I realized that Actual might not be a "normal" electron app. I'm so used to how it works that I forget it might be a little different.

One thing it does on startup is it forks the process which creates a background node process. This is the backend that runs the whole app. I don't know if that has any implications here, but that is one special thing it does compared to other Electron apps.

[johnlindquist]

Do you set any Environment variables when forking the background process?

[jlongster]

Not just for that process, but there are some env vars that the forked process inherits and are required to run:

Code for forking:

  serverProcess = fork(__dirname + '/server.js', [
    '--subprocess',
    app.getVersion(),
    socketName
  ]);

These two env vars get set in the electron main process and get inherited by the forked process:

  process.env.ACTUAL_DOCUMENT_DIR = app.getPath('documents');
  process.env.ACTUAL_DATA_DIR = app.getPath('userData');

I can take a look at some point as well, but won't have time for a little bit

[johnlindquist]

@JamesHenry looks like clearing the ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE env var fixes it:

delete process.env.ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE

exec(`open -a "Actual.app"`)

Script Kit works on the same "forking processes" principle (each script is a forked process controlled by the main Kit.app) that @jlongster uses for forking a background process. Script Kit's fork call is inheriting that env var from Electron which then conflicts with launching an Electron app which forks another node process (PHEW 😅)

I think I can safely delete that env var from my fork call to avoid anything like this in the future. I'll run some tests.

Thanks for the help @jlongster

[jlongster]

Cool, thanks @johnlindquist!

In the future our API will be a simple node script and not require Actual to be running, which should simplify JamesHenry's use case.

[JamesHenry]

Awesome, thanks for looking into this, Gents!

I’m AFK for a few hours but look forward to trying this out later