iTwin Studio developer mode

Development support in iTwin Studio

iTwin Studio allows enabling developer support features for easier app development and debugging.

Enabling development support allows:

• Running iTwin Studio in developer mode
• E2E testing support
• Chrome devTools

Enabling development support

Note

Enabling development support comes with inherent security risks and is only recommended for active app development. As such, enabling support will require elevated administrative permissions.

To enable development support, run the following command:

iTwinStudio developer enable

Note that it will prompt for elevated administrative permissions.

You can disable development support whenever you wish:

iTwinStudio developer disable

To check if developer support is enabled, you can also run:

iTwinStudio developer check

E2E testing support

iTwin Studio has some built-in support to make writing E2E tests with Playwright easier.

Due to potential security risks that come with allowing automation and eval calls, E2E testing is only allowed when development support is enabled.

Note that you can run E2E tests without entering iTwin Studio developer mode.

See app testing article for a more in-depth guide on writing tests.

Developer mode

iTwin Studio developer mode enables a handful of features for quick app development. For example:

• Support for hot reloading.
• Showing more in-depth information in changelogs and about page.
• Disabling app updates when debugging.
• Allowing to install locally built and/or unverified apps.
• Disabled Sentry and usage tracking.
• Sets NODE_ENV to ‘development’
• Enables React strict mode
• etc.

Enabling developer mode

After development support is enabled, you can enter developer mode whenever you wish.

To enable developer mode for a single session, simply append --useMode dev flag to your launch command. E.g.

iTwinStudio apps run my-app-id --useMode=dev
iTwinStudio some/path/to/my/app/app.config.json --useMode=dev

You can also set the default mode for iTwinStudio:

iTwinStudio devMode enable

Next time Studio is launched, it will run in developer mode even if --useMode dev flag is not given.

To switch back to standard mode, you can either use --useMode standard for a single session, or run iTwinStudio devMode disable to reset the default Studio behavior.

Chrome DevTools

After development support is enabled, you can open Chrome DevTools panel in both developer and in standard modes.

You can open development tools by using Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows and Linux) or Command+Shift+I (Mac).

Note that opening Chrome DevTools in standard mode is mainly recommended as a way to gather additional information, rather than debugging. E.g. in standard mode, React will be optimized, which will hide certain warnings and make debugging harder.