Samsung SmartTV DevTool — WITs

Published in

blutv

3 min readOct 5, 2021

WITs is a tool that can speed up and improve the development of your Tizen web application. If you use WITs to test your app on TV, you don’t have to package and install the app every time you change the code. In other words, WITs enables you to see the instant change in your Javascript, HTML and CSS code on SmartTV.

WITs instantly updates and reloads your app on your TV. It is an open source library and also uses NodeJS and SDB.

Prerequisites

NodeJS
Git
Samsung Tizen Studio (Installation steps)

Terminologies

Device (Your SmartTV)
Host (The computer you want to connect to the TV)

Install WITs

$ npm install -g @tizentv/wits

In order to deploy your application on your Samsung SmartTV, developer mode should be switched to ON.

Switch Developer Mode: ON

From your remote controller press Home, open Smart Hub and navigate to “Apps”

Enter “12345” in the “Apps” field using the remote control or the numeric keypad on the screen. The developer mode setup pop-up appears.

After developer mode opens switch developer mode to ON
Enter the IP address of the “Host” and click OK.
Restart your TV. You can turn the tv off by holding the power button for 2 seconds.

Final steps

You need to create two files before run your application; .witsconfig.json and profiles.xml

Certification

Run the code below to create your certification.

$ wits -c

Note: No need to run everytime deploy your application.

After you generate a certification, you can copy the path of profiles.xml because you are going to need it later.

Then, run the following command to config your profile path.

$ wits -i

After it is done, that command will generate a .witscommand.json

// .witscommand.json
{
   “connectionInfo”: {
   “deviceIp”: “192.168.0.0”,
   “hostIp”: “192.168.1.71”,
   “socketPort”: 4767,
   “width”: “1920”,
   “isDebugMode”: true
 },
   “profileInfo”: {
   “path”: “{path to certificate}/profiles.xml”
 }
}

You should move this file in your application’s folder.

/www
-- index.html
-- .witscommand.json
-- .witsignore

After all your configurations are done, run;

# Run wits --start
$ wits -s

Possible Issues

Issue

wits -s 
.... 
connect to....192.168.1.30 
Failed to connect 192.168.1.30

Possible Solutions

You are not on the same network as the device or the ip address is different.
You can edit the IP address at .witsconfig.json.