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An Electron React Example

This is an example of an Electron application using React bundled with Webpack. It is a part of my blog post about using Electron with React.

The example aims to be as simple as possible, skipping the use of Webpack DLL and other speed optimisations. You might end up using these in your own application, however all might not, so I didn't want to make this example more complicated than it needs to be.

The example can be currently packaged for Linux and Windows. Windows builds are verified with Windows developer VMs provided by Microsoft. I don't own any Apple products currently, so I can't verify the macOS builds. If you have a Mac and can verify the macOS builds, please feel free to create a pull request.

The example is not meant for production use, but rather as a starting point to understand how to use Electron with React. If you feel like it, however, you can use the example as a basis for your own application and add missing "production" features, such as DLLs, automatic updates, etc. yourself.

If you are looking for a more comprehensive (and a bit more involved) example with Typescript, I recommend checking out electron-react-boilerplate.

Running the example

Before you start, install the dependencies:

npm install

You can run the example in development mode with:

npm run dev

You can terminate the development mode with Ctrl+C.

You can package the application into Linux AppImage with:

npm run package -- --linux

After packaging, the AppImage file should be available in the release/build directory.

To build a package for windows, run:

npm run package -- --win

After packaging, the setup exe file should be available in the release/build directory.

White screen in the development mode

If you are running this example in development mode, and you see a white screen (nothing rendered), just select View->Reload in the example application menus (or press Ctrl+R). This occurs because the Webpack dev server is not yet ready when the application is started. This is not an issue in production builds. Since this is a simple example, I have implemented a simple wait mechanism to wait for the Webpack dev server to start. Depending on the speed of your webpack build, the wait might not be long enough. If this is the case, you can increase the default wait time (2000ms) in the package.json's sleep script.

"sleep": "node -e \"setTimeout(() => process.exit(0), 2000)\""

for example to wait 5 seconds, change the script to:

"sleep": "node -e \"setTimeout(() => process.exit(0), 5000)\""