/electron-forge

A complete tool for creating, publishing, and installing modern Electron applications

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Electron Forge

Build Status Discord npm version license status

A complete tool for building modern Electron applications.

Electron Forge unifies the existing (and well maintained) build tools for Electron development into a simple, easy to use package so that anyone can jump right in to Electron development.

🚨 🚧 WARNING 🚧 🚨

🏗️

The master branch is a rewrite of Electron Forge that will eventually be the 6.x series. If you are looking for the 5.x series (the version currently published to NPM under electron-forge), please view the 5.x branch.

Website | Goals | Docs and Usage | Configuration | Support | Contributing | Changelog

Getting Started

Note: Electron Forge requires Node 12.13.0 (LTS) or above, plus git installed.

If you have a more recent version of npm or yarn, you can use npx, or yarn create.

npx create-electron-app my-new-app
# or
yarn create electron-app my-new-app

# then
cd my-new-app
npm start

Alternatively (less recommended):

npm install -g @electron-forge/cli
electron-forge init my-new-app
cd my-new-app
npm start

Project Goals

  1. Starting with Electron should be as simple as a single command.
  2. Developers shouldn't have to worry about setting up build tooling, native module rebuilding, etc. Everything should "just work" for them out of the box.
  3. Everything from creating the project to packaging the project for release should be handled by one core dependency in a standard way while still offering users maximum choice and freedom.

With these goals in mind, under the hood this project uses, among others:

  • electron-rebuild: Automatically recompiles native Node.js modules against the correct Electron version.
  • Electron Packager: Customizes and bundles your Electron app to get it ready for distribution.

Docs and Usage

For Electron Forge documentation and usage you should check out our website: electronforge.io

FAQ

How do I use this with webpack/babel/typescript/other build tool?

By default, Electron Forge only runs vanilla (i.e., non-compiled) JavaScript, but for typescript, webpack, and other build tool support check out the plugins section of our docs site. We currently have plugins for Webpack and Electron Compile, and a template for Webpack.

Team
Samuel Attard Mark Lee