electron-boilerplate

Comprehensive boilerplate application for Electron.

This project gives you mainly three things:

Cross-platform development environment (works the same way on OSX, Windows and Linux).
Basic structure for Electron app.
Scripts to generate installers of your app for all three operating systems.

By the way, there is a twin project to this one: nw-boilerplate, which is the same thing but for NW.js.

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

There are two package.json files:

1. 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-prebuilt": "^0.24.0"
}

2. For your application

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

Project's folders

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.

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 pure-js 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

Adding native npm modules to your app

If you want to install native module you need to compile it agains Electron, not Node.js you are firing in command line by typing npm install (Read more).

npm run app-install -- name_of_npm_module

Of course this method works also for pure-js modules, so you can use it all the time if you're able to remember such an ugly command.

Module loader

How about splitting your JavaScript code into modules? This project supports it by new ES6 syntax (thanks to babel). ES6 modules are translated into AMD (RequireJS) modules. The main advantage of this setup is that you can use ES6 -> RequireJS for your own modules, and at the same time have normal access to node's require() to obtain stuff from npm.

// Modules you write are required through new ES6 syntax
// (It will be translated into AMD definition).
import myOwnModule from './my_own_module';
// Node.js (npm) modules are required the same way as always
// (so you can still access all the goodness of npm).
var moment = require('moment');

Unit tests

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.

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 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.

Special precautions for Windows

As installer NSIS is used. You have to install it (version 3.0), and add NSIS folder to PATH in Environment Variables, so it is reachable to scripts in this project (path should look something like C:/Program Files (x86)/NSIS).

License

The MIT License (MIT)

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.

bnwan/electron-boilerplate