RichLewis007 / electron-boilerplate

Boilerplate application for Electron runtime

electron-boilerplate

Minimalistic yet comprehensive boilerplate application for Electron runtime.

Provides cross-platform development environment, which works the same way on OSX, Windows and Linux, and allows you to generate ready for distribution installers of your app for those operating systems.

At the same time this boilerplate does not impose on you any framework (like Angular or React). Tries to give you only the 'electron' part of technology stack so you can pick your favorite tools for 'the actual app' part.

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

... and boom! You have running desktop application on your screen.

Structure of the project

Declaring dependencies

There are two package.json files:

1. package.json for development

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": "1.3.3"
}

Note: Electron authors advise to use fixed version here.

2. package.json for your application

Sits on path: electron-boilerplate/app/package.json. This is real manifest of your application. Declare your app dependencies here.

OMG, but seriously why there are two package.json?

1. 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.
2. 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 (reside outside the app directory).

Folders

The applicaiton is split between two main folders...

src - this folder is intended for files which need to be transpiled or compiled (files which can't be used directly by electron).

app - contains all static assets (put here images, css, html etc.) which don't need any pre-processing.

Build process compiles all stuff from src folder and puts it into app folder, so after build finished app contains full, runnable application.

Treat src and app folders like two halves of one bigger thing.

Drawback of this design is that app folder contains some files which should be git-ignored and some which should not (see .gitignore file). But thanks to this split development builds are much much faster.

Development

Installation

npm install

It will also download Electron runtime, and install dependencies for second package.json file inside app folder.

Starting the app

npm start

Adding npm modules to your app

Remember to add your dependency to app/package.json file, so do:

cd app
npm install name_of_npm_module --save

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 it in app folder.

So for file in src folder do this:

import myStuff from './my_lib/my_stuff';

But in file in app folder the same line must look as follows:

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

Testing

electron-boilerplate has preconfigured test environments...

Unit tests

Using electron-mocha test runner with the chai assertion library. To run the tests go with standard:

npm test

Test task searches for all files in src directory which respect pattern *.spec.js.

Those tests can be plugged into continuous integration system.

End to end tests

Using mocha test runner and spectron. Run with command:

npm run e2e

The task searches for all files in e2e directory which respect pattern *.e2e.js.

Making a release

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 dist 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.

All packaging actions are handled by electron-builder. See docs of this tool if you want to customize something.

License

Released under the MIT license.