Development Environment

Installing Everything

Every Door is a Flutter app, and I cannot beat the conscise step-by-step setting up walkthrough on the Flutter website. Please follow it through.

My IDE of choice is the standard Android Studio: it includes an Android emulator and all tools to build and package Android apps. On macOS it would make sense to use XCode instead. There's no point in downloading VSCode just to install Flutter: the alternative is just unzipping a file and adding the result to PATH.

For small changes I use Vim with YouCompleteMe for LSP (see here) and dart-vim-plugin for formatting. Note that Dart LSP is huge and slow to load, so there isn't much memory benefit from using Vim over other IDEs.

Also keep in mind when installing Flutter SDK that despite it being 2025, it is still risky using directories with spaces in them.

Building Every Door

First, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Zverik/every_door.git

You can add --recursive if you plan on testing vendored Flutter SDK, but there's generally no need.

Then you would need a preset database asset. For releases, it is downloaded. Put it in the assets/ directory. For developing, the proper way would be to download taginfo-db.db and unpack it somewhere (it's ~9 GB). Then enter the tools directory and run:

./update.sh /path/to/taginfo.db

Now you need to create an language file lib/l10n/app_zh.arb with no content ({}), because Flutter i18n has problems with absent parent language packs:

echo '{}' > lib/l10n/app_zh.arb

And you're all set! Open the project in your IDE and run it, or build it from console:

flutter pub get
dart run build_runner build
flutter build
flutter run # if you have a phone connected or an emulator running

The build_runner step creates a lib/commit_info.g.dart file with a current git commit hash. You do not need to re-run it unless you're publishing an apk for others to test, and want them to copy the full version (which is located on the About pane).

Submitting Changes

Before starting work on a large feature, please consult with design principles, or maybe contact Ilya. It would be a pity to leave a big pull request rejected because of a disagreement. Of course that hasn't happened yet, and we strive to accept all contributions.

If you're looking for a task to work on, check the roadmap. Anything on it is a wanted feature or a bug fix. An assigned milestone means higher priority.

Now, creating a pull request is pretty easy, you don't need to collect much data for it, unlike a bug report. If the change is visual, a screenshot or a video would be appreciated. Please keep changes to a minimum: e.g. don't reformat the entire code base. Note that we use the standard default Dart format rules.

The one rule to have your changes merged is, please respond to comments and update your code accordingly. We would like you to do all the needed changes, not do that ourselves. Please rebase your branch onto main yourself if there are possible merge conflicts. Unless there are conceptual issues with a pull request, and if you keep replying, your work won't get lost, and you will be mentioned in a change log.

It's possible maintaner(s) might forget about your pull requests. Please wait a few days and post a comment to your pull request to remind them. Every Door is a hobby project, and maintainers might be busy with their jobs or family. Help in reviewing other pull requests is appreciated!

Every Door is licensed under the ISC License. You should make every effort to ensure you only submit patches which are unencumbered by conflicting intellectual property rights.