Grist Electron app

This is an Electron build of Grist. Use with your own Grist documents or documents you trust since there is no sandboxing (yet!).

Download

See https://github.com/paulfitz/grist-electron/releases

Screenshots

The Grist Meme Generator template being edited on an Intel Mac.

A Wedding Planner on Ubuntu.

A D&D Encounter Tracker on an ARM Mac (M1).

A Doggy Daycare spreadsheet running on an old super-low-resolution Windows 7 setup.

Grist Electron being used as a server on a LAN, on Windows 10 Pro (credit: Sylvain_Page).

How to build from source

You'll need an environment with bash, git, and yarn.

git submodule init
git submodule update
yarn install
yarn run setup
yarn run build
yarn run electron:preview
yarn run electron

Configure

There's no configuration needed if you are just running this as a regular app to view and edit Grist documents on your laptop.

Some people use the app as a quick way to set up a simple Grist server in a local network where everyone is trusted. Be sure you know what you're doing - if you have any security concerns at all, I'd urge you to do a proper Grist server installation - see https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/

If you are sure you are in a trusted environment, you can set some environment variables to make Grist listen on a specific network interface and port:

GRIST_HOST=192.168.1.22     # IP address to serve from
GRIST_PORT=8484             # Port number to serve at
GRIST_ELECTRON_AUTH=strict  # Auth strategy (strict, mixed, or none)

(You can create a .env file in the root directory of the app and set the environment variables there). Set GRIST_ELECTRON_AUTH to none to allow access across the network just as if you were using the app. Set GRIST_ELECTRON_AUTH to mixed to allow anonymous access across the network, but not logins. Set GRIST_ELECTRON_AUTH to strict to require logins and to permit them only in the app.

Don't think any of this is secure. There is no sandboxing, so an untrusted user who can edit formulas would have access to unrestricted Python running on your machine, and that's dangerous. Connections are plain http and not encrypted https, so network traffic could be readable in transit. And there’s no real login mechanism built in.

History

Learn the back-story of this work in the Packaging Grist as an Electron app forum thread.

It draws on some ideas from https://github.com/stan-donarise/grist-core-electron/ and from an early standalone version of Grist developed at Grist Labs.