As a result of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, I have neither the time nor the strength to continue working. π₯
Vite+Electron = π₯
This is template for secure electron applications. Written following the latest safety requirements, recommendations and best practices.
Under the hood is used Vite β superfast, nextgen bundler, and electron-builder for compilation.
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This template maintained by Alex Kozack. You can π sponsor him for continued development of this template.
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Found a problem? Pull requests are welcome.
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If you have ideas, questions or suggestions - Welcome to discussions. π
Follow these steps to get started with this template:
- Click the Use this template button (you must be logged in) or just clone this repo.
- If you want to use another package manager don't forget to edit
.github/workflows
-- it usesnpm
by default.
That's all you need. π
Note: This template uses npm v7 feature β Installing Peer Dependencies Automatically. If you are using a different package manager, you may need to install some peerDependencies manually.
Note: Find more useful forks here.
- This template uses the latest electron version with all the latest security patches.
- The architecture of the application is built according to the security guides and best practices.
- The latest version of the electron-builder is used to compile the application.
- Vite is used to bundle all source codes. This is an extremely fast packer that has a bunch of great features. You can learn more about how it is arranged in this video.
- Vite supports reading
.env
files. You can also specify types of your environment variables intypes/env.d.ts
. - Hot reloads for
Main
andRenderer
processes.
Vite provides many useful features, such as: TypeScript
, TSX/JSX
, CSS/JSON Importing
, CSS Modules
, Web Assembly
and much more.
- The latest version of TypeScript is used for all the source code.
- Vite supports TypeScript out of the box. However, it does not support type checking.
- Code formatting rules follow the latest TypeScript recommendations and best practices thanks to @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin.
See this discussion if you want completely remove TypeScript.
- By default, web pages are built using Vue. However, you can easily change that. Or not use additional frameworks at all.
- Code formatting rules follow the latest Vue recommendations and best practices thanks to eslint-plugin-vue.
- Installed Vue.js devtools beta with Vue 3 support.
See examples of web pages for different frameworks.
- The configured workflow will check the types for each push and PR.
- The configured workflow will check the code style for each push and PR.
- Automatic tests used Vitest
-- A blazing fast test framework powered by Vite.
- Unit tests are placed within each package and run separately.
- End-to-end tests are placed in the root
tests
directory and use playwright.
- Each time you push changes to the
main
branch, therelease
workflow starts, which creates a release draft.- The version is automatically set based on the current date in the format
yy.mm.dd-minutes
. - Notes are automatically generated and added to the release draft.
- Code signing supported. See
compile
job in therelease
workflow.
- The version is automatically set based on the current date in the format
- Auto-update is supported. After the release is published, all client applications will download the new version and install updates silently.
The template requires a minimum amount dependencies. Only Vite is used for building, nothing more.
The structure of this template is very similar to the structure of a monorepo.
The entire source code of the program is divided into three modules (packages) that are each bundled independently:
packages/main
Electron main script.packages/preload
Used inBrowserWindow.webPreferences.preload
. See Checklist: Security Recommendations.packages/renderer
Electron web page.
The main
and preload
packages are built in library mode as it is simple javascript.
The renderer
package builds as a regular web app.
The next step is to package and compile a ready to distribute Electron app for macOS, Windows and Linux with "auto update" support out of the box.
To do this using the electron-builder:
- Using the npm script
compile
: This script is configured to compile the application as quickly as possible. It is not ready for distribution, it is compiled only for the current platform and is used for debugging. - Using GitHub Actions: The application is compiled for any platform and ready-to-distribute files are automatically added as a draft to the GitHub releases page.
There is one important nuance when working with dependencies. At the build stage Vite will analyze your code, find all the imported dependencies, apply tree shaking, optimize and bundle them inside the output source files. So when you write something like this:
// source.ts
import {createApp} from 'vue'
createApp()
It turns into:
// bundle.js
function createApp() { /* ... */ }
createApp()
Which leaves basically no imports during runtime.
But it doesn't always work. Vite was designed to work with browser-oriented packages. So it is not able to bundle Node built-in modules, or native dependencies, or some Node.js specific packages, or Electron itself.
Modules that Vite is unable to bundle are forced to be supplied as external
in vite.config.js
. External modules are not optimized and their imports remain during runtime.
// source.ts
import {writeFile} from 'fs'
writeFile()
// bundle.js
const {writeFile} = require('fs')
writeFile()
According to Electron's security guidelines, Node.js integration is disabled for remote content. This means that you cannot call any Node.js api in the packages/renderer
directly. This also means you can't import external modules during runtime in the renderer:
// renderer.bundle.js
const {writeFile} = require('fs') // ReferenceError: require is not defined
writeFile()
To use external modules in Renderer you must describe the interface in the packages/preload
where the Node.js api is allowed:
// packages/preload/src/index.ts
import {type BinaryLike, createHash} from 'crypto';
import {exposeInMainWorld} from './exposeInMainWorld';
exposeInMainWorld('nodeCrypto', {
sha256sum(data: BinaryLike) {
const hash = createHash('sha256');
hash.update(data);
return hash.digest('hex');
},
});
If you use a TypeScript you must add the signature of your method to the contracts:
// packages/preload/contracts.d.ts
interface Exposed {
nodeCrypto: {
sha256sum(data: import("crypto").BinaryLike): string;
};
}
And now, you can safely use the registered method:
// packages/renderer/src/App.vue
window.nodeCrypto.sha256sum('data')
As a result, the architecture of interaction between all modules is as follows:
flowchart LR;
R --> W[Web API]
R --> BD[Bundled dependencies]
R[Renderer] -- Call Exposed API --> P[Preload] --> N[Node.js API]
P --> ED[External dependencies]
P --> ER[Electron Renderer Process Modules]
P <-. IPC Messages .-> M[Main] --> EM[Electron Main Process Modules]
Read more about Security Considerations.
All environment variables set as part of the import.meta
, so you can access them as follows: import.meta.env
.
If you are using TypeScript and want to get code completion you must add all the environment variables to the ImportMetaEnv
in types/env.d.ts
.
The mode option is used to specify the value of import.meta.env.MODE
and the corresponding environment variables files that need to be loaded.
By default, there are two modes:
production
is used by defaultdevelopment
is used bynpm run watch
script
When running the build script, the environment variables are loaded from the following files in your project root:
.env # loaded in all cases
.env.local # loaded in all cases, ignored by git
.env.[mode] # only loaded in specified env mode
.env.[mode].local # only loaded in specified env mode, ignored by git
To prevent accidentally leaking env variables to the client, only variables prefixed with VITE_
are exposed to your Vite-processed code. e.g. the following file:
DB_PASSWORD=foobar
VITE_SOME_KEY=123
Only VITE_SOME_KEY
will be exposed as import.meta.env.VITE_SOME_KEY
to your client source code, but DB_PASSWORD
will not.
See Contributing Guide.