Building

Building

Visual Studio 2017 is required (2019 probably works as well, but consider it not supported officially).

PowerShell 7 and .NET SDK 4.6.2 is required to build the application.

For building inside VS make sure you are switched to x86 solution configuration.

Development environment

Debug builds are configured to throw exceptions even in cases where Release builds would log error message. This is mainly for cases where Playnite can recover and still work properly, but indicates some issue that should be investigated. If you want to suppress these exceptions with Debug builds then edit Common.config and set ThrowAllErrors to False.

Fullscreen mode development

Fullscreen mode uses custom font files that can't be redistributed with Playnite's source. If you want to develop Fullscreen mode, then you have to obtain your own license or replace them with compatible ones.

Playnite Services deployment

Several Playnite features depended on a separate Playnite service. Specifically:

• Steam library import
• IGDB integration
• Patreon integration

To deploy your own services instance:

• Navigate to source\PlayniteServices\ folder
• Create configuration file customSettings.json
• Specify content of customSettings.json based on appsettings.json. For example adding your own Steam API key will look like this:

  "Steam": {
    "ApiKey": "customapikeyhere"
  }

• You need to provide your own API keys and other values for all empty fields from appsettings.json (just for services that you want to use, you can ignore Patreon values for example)
• open cmdline and run dotnet run from the same folder
• server should start and listen on port 5000
• Optional: Configure root endpoint inside App.Debug.config file via ServicesUrl key if you start service on other port then default 5000.

DO NOT run let development builds connect to production service instance. This might potentially lead to serious issues causing problems to all users!

Auto-Update

Requires simple web server serving info.json file with information about available files. URL with info.json has to be configured in App.Debug.config file via UpdateUrl key (http://localhost/update by default).

Example file:

{
    "latestVersion":  "4.21",
    "downloadServers": [
        "http://localhost/build/",
        "http://localhost/mirror/"
    ],
    "releaseNotesUrlRoots" : [ 
        "http://localhost/update/"
    ],
    "packages": [
        {
            "baseVersion" : "4.21",
            "fileName": "421.exe",
            "checksum": "C4CEEA6981242B9087FF9065CE8E5AFD"
        },
        {
            "baseVersion" : "4.2",
            "fileName": "42to421.exe",
            "checksum": "EECEEA6981242B9087FF9065CE8E5AFD"
        },
        {
            "baseVersion" : "4.1",
            "fileName": "41to421.exe",
            "checksum": "BBBEEA6981242B9087FF9065CE8E5AFD"
        }
    ],
    "releaseNotes" : [
        {
            "version" : "4.21",
            "fileName" : "4.21.html"
        },
        {
            "version" : "4.2",
            "fileName" : "4.2.html"
        },
        {
            "version" : "4.1",
            "fileName" : "4.1.html"
        }
    ]
}