verify

name	verify
description	Project recipe for driving the real Tauri shell (apps/client) to verify a UI/IPC change end-to-end, rather than only running tests/typecheck. Use as the handle for the generic verify skill in this repo.

Verifying a UI/IPC change in this repo

This is a Tauri 2 desktop app (crates-tauri/tt-app + apps/client). The real surface is the WebKitGTK WebView driven over real Rust IPC — never the mock-data browser dev server, never just vitest/tsc.

Get a handle

npm run dev:drive > /tmp/.../dev-drive.log 2>&1 &   # background; builds + launches the real app
disown

The Rust build (cargo) + Vite dev server take 1–3 minutes cold (less if target/ is warm). Poll readiness instead of a fixed sleep:

until node scripts/drive.mjs status; do sleep 3; done   # blocks until the automation server answers

node scripts/drive.mjs status → {"ready": true} once up. Ports are per-task/deterministic (TT_DEV_PORT-derived); drive.mjs finds them with no args, so nothing needs manual configuration.

Drive it

node scripts/drive.mjs invoke ab_get_state      # real Agentboard state (repos/folders/sessions)
node scripts/drive.mjs invoke store_snapshot    # real store snapshot (prs/issues/tasks/events)
node scripts/drive.mjs shot <name>              # → e2e/screenshots/<name>.png (gitignored) — Read it
node scripts/drive.mjs eval '<js expression>'   # runs in the live window, must be one expression
node scripts/drive.mjs clicktext "Board"        # click by visible text

Gotcha: the left nav rail icons carry no visible text, only aria-label — clicktext can't find them. Click by eval instead:

node scripts/drive.mjs eval '(() => { document.querySelector(`[aria-label="Agentboard"]`).click(); return "clicked"; })()'

Gotcha: eval's arg is wrapped as await (<expr>) — pass an expression (an IIFE), not a statement list with ; at the top level.

Synthetic state, when real state won't cooperate

The frontend hydrates from two live event streams: agentboard://state (useAgentboardState, apps/client/src/lib/agentboard.ts) and store://snapshot (useStoreSnapshot, apps/client/src/lib/data.ts). Both can be driven directly from the page's own JS context — no Rust command needed — via the same IPC call @tauri-apps/api/event's emit() uses under the hood:

await window.__TAURI_INTERNALS__.invoke('plugin:event|emit', {
  event: 'agentboard://state', // or 'store://snapshot'
  payload: { ...real payload from ab_get_state, with your fixture mutated in... },
});

Take the real payload (invoke ab_get_state/invoke store_snapshot), mutate just the field(s) under test, bump StatePayload.ts (any event with a lower ts than the current one is dropped), and emit. This loses the race to the real backend's own ~2s poll if you wait even a second before screenshotting — which is a feature, not a bug: real ground truth always wins, so a disagreement between your fixture and what renders means the real watcher already overwrote it with (possibly more interesting) real data. Screenshot immediately after the eval call.

Do the emit + navigate + click in one eval call, not several. Splitting across multiple eval/shot round-trips (even ~1s apart) gives the real watcher time to win the race and silently overwrite your fixture before the screenshot — you'll see a partial result (e.g. a fabricated PR persists because PRs poll slowly, but dirty/diff stats already got refreshed back to real values because git-stats polls fast). One combined async IIFE that emits, clicks the nav item, and clicks the target row, immediately followed by shot, is reliable; anything split across calls isn't.

Also useful: if the real machine has another Towles Tool instance running (the user's daily driver), you'll see it in the log — slack socket: another instance already holds the singleton lock, parking — and should expect the tracked-repos/PR state to keep moving under you between polls, independent of anything you did.

Don't click destructive-looking buttons

The auto-mode permission classifier blocks clicks on buttons whose visible text reads as destructive (e.g. "delete"), even when the actual handler only opens a confirmation AlertDialog (as requestDeleteWorktree → performDeleteWorktree does in screens/agentboard.tsx). Don't try to work around it — verify that code path by reading the guard instead of clicking through it live.

Shut down

dev:drive spawns tauri as its own process-group leader; a background & launch has no wrapper to relay a signal, so kill the whole group:

ps aux | grep -E "dev-drive|tauri dev|target/debug/tt-app|vite" | grep -v grep
kill -- -$(ps -o pgid= -p <any pid in the tree> | tr -d ' ')

Confirm with node scripts/drive.mjs status (should fail to connect) rather than trusting ps alone — vite/esbuild can survive as an orphan.