Comprehensive boilerplate application for Electron runtime.
Scope of this project:
- Provide basic structure of the application so you can much easier grasp what should go where.
- Give you cross-platform development environment, which works the same way on OSX, Windows and Linux.
- Generate ready for distribution installers of your app for all three operating systems.
NOT in the scope:
- Imposing on you any framework (e.g. Angular, React). You can integrate the one which makes most sense for you.
By the way, there is a twin project to this one: nw-boilerplate, which is the same thing but for NW.js.
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
... and boom! You have running desktop application on your screen.
There are two package.json
files:
Sits on path: electron-boilerplate/package.json
. Here you declare dependencies for your development environment and build scripts. This file is not distributed with real application!
Also here you declare the version of Electron runtime you want to use:
"devDependencies": {
"electron-prebuilt": "^0.34.0"
}
Sits on path: electron-boilerplate/app/package.json
. This is real manifest of your application. Declare your app dependencies here.
- Native npm modules (those written in C, not JavaScript) need to be compiled, and here we have two different compilation targets for them. Those used in application need to be compiled against electron runtime, and all
devDependencies
need to be compiled against your locally installed node.js. Thanks to having two files this is trivial. - When you package the app for distribution there is no need to add up to size of the app with your
devDependencies
. Here those are always not included (because reside outside theapp
directory).
app
- code of your application goes here.config
- place for you to declare environment specific stuff.build
- in this folder lands built, runnable application.releases
- ready for distribution installers will land here.resources
- resources for particular operating system.tasks
- build and development environment scripts.
npm install
It will also download Electron runtime, and install dependencies for second package.json
file inside app
folder.
npm start
Remember to add your dependency to app/package.json
file, so do:
cd app
npm install name_of_npm_module --save
How about being future proof and using ES6 modules all the time in your app? Thanks to rollup you can do that. It will transpile the imports to proper require()
statements, so even though ES6 modules aren't natively supported yet you can start using them today.
You can use it on those kinds of modules:
// Modules authored by you
import { myStuff } from './my_lib/my_stuff';
// Node.js native
import fs from 'fs';
// Electron native
import { app } from 'electron';
// Loaded from npm
import moment from 'moment';
The build script copies files from app
to build
directory and the application is started from build
. Therefore if you want to use any special file/folder in your app make sure it will be copied via some of glob patterns in tasks/build.js
:
var paths = {
copyFromAppDir: [
'./node_modules/**',
'./vendor/**',
'./**/*.html',
'./**/*.+(jpg|png|svg)'
],
}
electron-boilerplate has preconfigured jasmine unit test runner. To run it go with standard:
npm test
You don't have to declare paths to spec files in any particular place. The runner will search through the project for all *.spec.js
files and include them automatically.
Note: There are various icon and bitmap files in resources
directory. Those are used in installers and are intended to be replaced by your own graphics.
To make ready for distribution 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 releases
directory.
You can create Windows installer only when running on Windows, the same is true for Linux and OSX. So to generate all three installers you need all three operating systems.
The Mac release supports code signing. To sign the .app
in the release image, include the certificate ID in the command as so,
npm run release -- --sign A123456789
The installer is built using NSIS. You have to install NSIS version 3.0, and add its folder to PATH in Environment Variables, so it is reachable to scripts in this project. For example, C:\Program Files (x86)\NSIS
.
There are still a lot of 32-bit Windows installations in use. If you want to support those systems and have 64-bit OS make sure you've installed 32-bit (instead of 64-bit) Node version. There are versions managers if you feel the need for both architectures on the same machine.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Jakub Szwacz
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.