gulp-awesome-electron

By using gulp-awesome-electron you can build cross platform desktop apps using GitHub Electron straight from your gulp build process. This module is a fork with some small extensions from gulp-atom-electron.

##Enhancements compared to gulp-atom-electron

include icons for Windows executables when build on MacOS or Linux
provide custom path to cache electron binaries

Installation

$ npm i gulp-awesome-electron --save-dev

Building for Windows from MacOS or Linux

If you want to build for windows either from a MacOS or Linux, you've to install Wine version ^1.6.0.

Usage

You can use gulp-awesome-electron for tow different tasks:

for packaging your application
for downloading an electron release to your disk

How to Package Your Application

You should source your app's files using gulp.src and pipe them through gulp-atom-electron. The following task will create your application in the app folder, ready for launch.

const gulp = require('gulp'),
    symdest = require('gulp-symdest'),
    electron = require('gulp-awesome-electron');

gulp.task('default',() => {
	return gulp.src('src/**')
		.pipe(electron({
		    version: '1.4.0',
            platform: 'darwin',
		    cache: '~/.electron-cache/',
		    companyName: 'your company name here',
		    token: process.env.GH_TOKEN,
		    linuxExecutableName: 'AwesomeElectron'
        }))
		.pipe(symdest('app'));
});

Note: It is important to use gulp-symdest only because of the OS X platform. An application bundle has symlinks within and if you use gulp.dest to pipe the built app to disk, those will be missing. symdest will make sure symlinks are taken into account.

Finally, you can always pipe it to a zip archive for easy distribution. joaomoreno/gulp-vinyl-zip is recommended:

const gulp = require('gulp'),
    zip = require('gulp-vinyl-zip'),
    electron = require('gulp-awesome-electron');

gulp.task('default', () => {
	return gulp.src('src/**')
		.pipe(electron({
		    version: '1.4.0',
            platform: 'darwin',
            cache: '~/.electron-cache/',
            companyName: 'your company name here',
            token: process.env.GH_TOKEN,
            linuxExecutableName: 'AwesomeElectron'
        }))
		.pipe(zip.dest('app-darwin.zip'));
});

How to Download Electron

There's also a very handy export electron.dest() function that makes sure you always have the exact version of Electron in a directory:

$ npm i gulp run-sequence gulp-awesome-electron --save-dev

const gulp = require('gulp'),
    runSequence = require('run-sequence'),
    electron = require('gulp-awesome-electron');

let download = (version, platform) => {
    return electron
        .dest('~/.electron-cache', {
            version: version,
            platform: platform
       });
};

gulp.task('download-windows', () => {
    return download('1.4.0', 'win32')
});

gulp.task('download-linux', () => {
    return download('1.4.0', 'linux')
});

gulp.task('download-macos', () => {
    return download('1.4.0', 'darwin')
});

gulp.task('default', (done) => {
    return runSequence(['download-windows', 'download-linux', 'download-macos'], done);
});

This will place a vanilla Electron build into the electron-build directory. If you run it consecutively and it detects that the version in the destination directory is the intended one, it will end up in a no-op. Else it will download the provided version and replace it.

Options

You must provide the following options:

version - the Electron version to use
platform - kind of OS (darwin, linux or win32)

The following options are optional:

quiet - suppress a progress bar when downloading
cache - provide a custom folder path where electron binaries will be cached. (Defaults to os.tempDir/gulp-awesome-electron-cache)
token - GitHub access token(to avoid request limit. You can grab it here)
arch - the processor architecture (ia32, x64)
Windows only
- winIcon - path to an .ico file
- companyName - company name
- copyright - copyright statement
MacOS (darwin) only
- darwinIcon - path to an .icns file
- darwinBundleDocumentTypes - (reference) array of dictionaries, each containing the following structure:
- name - the CFBundleTypeName value
- role - the CFBundleTypeRole value
- ostypes - the CFBundleTypeOSTypes value, a string array
- extensions - the CFBundleTypeExtensions value, a string array of file extensions
- iconFile - the CFBundleTypeIconFile value
Linux only
- linuxExecutableName - overwrite the name of the executable in Linux