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Make sure you have Node.js installed, then type the following commands known to every Node developer...
git clone https://github.com/szwacz/electron-boilerplate.git
cd electron-boilerplate
npm install
npm start
...and you have a running desktop application on your screen.
The application consists of two main folders...
src
- files within this folder get transpiled or compiled (because Electron can't use them directly).
app
- contains all static assets which don't need any pre-processing. Put here images, CSSes, HTMLs, etc.
The build process compiles the content of the src
folder and puts it into the app
folder, so after the build has finished, your app
folder contains the full, runnable application.
Treat src
and app
folders like two halves of one bigger thing.
The drawback of this design is that app
folder contains some files which should be git-ignored and some which shouldn't (see .gitignore
file). But this two-folders split makes development builds much, much faster.
npm start
Build process uses Webpack. The entry-points are src/background.js
and src/app.js
. Webpack will follow all import
statements starting from those files and compile code of the whole dependency tree into one .js
file for each entry point.
Babel is also utilised, but mainly for its great error messages. Electron under the hood runs latest Chromium, hence most of the new JavaScript features are already natively supported.
Environmental variables are done in a bit different way (not via process.env
). Env files are plain JSONs in config
directory, and build process dynamically links one of them as an env
module. You can import it wherever in code you need access to the environment.
import env from "env";
console.log(env.name);
To do so edit package.json
:
"devDependencies": {
"electron": "2.0.2"
}
Side note: Electron authors recommend to use fixed version here.
Remember to respect the split between dependencies
and devDependencies
in package.json
file. Your distributable app will contain modules listed in dependencies
after running the release script.
Side note: If the module you want to use in your app is a native one (not pure JavaScript but compiled binary) you should first run npm install name_of_npm_module
and then npm run postinstall
to rebuild the module for Electron. You need to do this once after you're first time installing the module. Later on, the postinstall script will fire automatically with every npm install
.
Run all tests:
npm test
npm run unit
Using electron-mocha test runner with the Chai assertion library. You can put your spec files wherever you want within the src
directory, just name them with the .spec.js
extension.
npm run e2e
Using Mocha and Spectron. This task will run all files in e2e
directory with .e2e.js
extension.
To package your app into an installer use command:
npm run release
Once the packaging process finished, the dist
directory will contain your distributable file.
We use electron-builder to handle the packaging process. It has a lot of customization options, which you can declare under "build"
key in package.json
.
You can package your app cross-platform from a single operating system, electron-builder kind of supports this, but there are limitations and asterisks. That's why this boilerplate doesn't do that by default.