generic-electron-app

Generic Electron App for various use-cases

Quick start

The only development dependency of this project is Node.js, so just make sure you have it installed. Then type few commands known to every Node developer...

git clone https://github.com/szwacz/electron-boilerplate.git
cd electron-boilerplate
npm install
npm start

Starting the app

npm start

Upgrading Electron version

The version of Electron runtime your app is using is declared in package.json:

"devDependencies": {
  "electron": "1.6.2"
}

Adding npm modules to the app

Remember to respect the split between dependencies and devDependencies in package.json file. Only modules listed in dependencies will be included into distributable app when you run the release script.

Side note: If the module you want to use in your app is a native one (not pure JavaScript but compiled C code or something) you should first run npm install name_of_npm_module --save and then npm run postinstall to rebuild the module for Electron. This needs to be done only once when you're first time installing the module. Later on postinstall script will fire automatically with every npm install.

Working with modules

Thanks to rollup you can (and should) use ES6 modules for all code in src folder. But because ES6 modules still aren't natively supported you can't use them in the app folder.

Use ES6 syntax in the src folder like this:

import myStuff from './my_lib/my_stuff';

But use CommonJS syntax in app folder. So the code from above should look as follows:

var myStuff = require('./my_lib/my_stuff');

Testing

Unit tests

npm test

Using electron-mocha test runner with the chai assertion library. This task searches for all files in src directory which respect pattern *.spec.js (so you can put unit test file in the same directory as the tested file).

End to end tests

npm run e2e

Using mocha test runner and spectron. This task searches for all files in e2e directory which respect pattern *.e2e.js.

Code coverage

npm run coverage

Using istanbul code coverage tool.

You can set the reporter(s) by setting ISTANBUL_REPORTERS environment variable (defaults to text-summary and html). The report directory can be set with ISTANBUL_REPORT_DIR (defaults to coverage).

Continuous integration

Electron can be plugged into CI systems. Here two CIs are preconfigured for you. Travis CI tests on macOS and Linux, App Veyor tests on Windows.

Making a release

To package your app into an installer use command:

npm run release

It will start the packaging process for operating system you are running this command on. Ready for distribution file will be outputted to dist directory.

You can create Windows installer only when running on Windows, the same is true for Linux and macOS. So to generate all three installers you need all three operating systems.

All packaging actions are handled by electron-builder. It has a lot of customization options, which you can declare under "build" key in package.json file.

License

Released under the MIT license.