Vite Electron Builder Boilerplate
Vite+Electron = 🔥
This is a secure template for electron applications. Written following the latest safety requirements, recommendations and best practices.
Under the hood is used Vite — super fast, nextgen bundler, and electron-builder for compilation.
Support
-
This template maintained by Alex Kozack. You can 💖 sponsor him for continued development of this template.
-
Found a problem? Pull requests are welcome.
-
If you have ideas, questions or suggestions - Welcome to discussions. 😊
Get started
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 use another package manager don't forget edit
.github/workflows
-- it usesnpm
by default.
That's all you need. 😉
Note: This template uses npm v7 feature — Installing Peer Dependencies Automatically. If you are using a different package manager, you may need to install some peerDependencies manually.
Features
Electron
- Template use 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
- 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/vite-env.d.ts
. - Hot reloads for
Main
andRenderer
processes.
Vite provides you with many useful features, such as: TypeScript
, TSX/JSX
, CSS/JSON Importing
, CSS Modules
, Web Assembly
and much more.
(optional)
TypeScript- The Latest TypeScript is used for all 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.
- Automatically create interface declarations for all APIs that have been passed to
electron.contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld
. Thanks dts-for-context-bridge .
See this discussion if you want completly remove TypeScript.
(optional)
Vue- By default, web pages are built using Vue. However, you can easily change it. Or do not use additional frameworks at all. (See React fork)
- Also, by default, the vue-router version is used.
- 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.
Continuous Integration
- The configured workflow for check the types for each push and PR.
- The configured workflow for check the code style for each push and PR.
- Automatic tests used playwright. Simple, automated test check:
- Does the main window created and visible?
- Is the main window not empty?
- Is dev tools closed?
- Is preload script loaded?
Continuous delivery
- Each time you push changes to the
main
branch,release
workflow starts, which creates 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 inrelease
workflow.
- The version is automatically set based on the current date in the format
- Auto-update is supported. After the release will be published, all client applications will download the new version and install updates silently.
Status
This template was created to make my work easier. It may not be universal, but I try to keep it that way.
I am actively involved in its development. But I do not guarantee that this template will be maintained in the future.
At the moment, there are the following problems:
- ⚠ Playwright has experimental support for Electron.
- ⚠ Release notes are created automatically based on commit history.
.github/actions/release-notes
is used for generation. It may not provide some scenarios. If you encounter a problem - write about it. - ⏳ I want to migrate all code base to ESM. But because Nodejs ecosystem is unprepared I have not known whether this will give more benefits or more inconvenience.
Some improvement or problems can be listed in issues.
Pull requests are welcome.
How it works
The template required a minimum dependencies. Only Vite is used for building, nothing more.
Project Structure
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 bundled each independently:
packages/main
Electron main script.packages/preload
Used inBrowserWindow.webPreferences.preload
. See Checklist: Security Recommendations.packages/renderer
Electron web page.
Build web resources
Packages main
and preload
are built in library mode as it is a simple javascript.
renderer
package build as regular web app.
The build of web resources is performed in the scripts/build.js
. Its analogue is a sequential call to vite build
for each package.
Compile App
Next step is run packaging and compilation a ready for distribution Electron app for macOS, Windows and Linux with "auto update" support out of the box.
To do this, using the electron-builder:
- In npm script
compile
: This script is configured to compile the application as quickly as possible. It is not ready for distribution, is compiled only for the current platform and is used for debugging. - In GitHub Action: The application is compiled for any platform and ready-to-distribute files are automatically added to the draft GitHub release.
Using Node.js API in renderer
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. To do this, you must describe the interface in the packages/preload
where Node.js api is allowed:
// packages/preload/src/index.ts
import type {BinaryLike} from 'crypto';
import {createHash} from 'crypto';
contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('nodeCrypto', {
sha256sum(data: BinaryLike) {
const hash = createHash('sha256');
hash.update(data);
return hash.digest('hex');
},
});
The dts-cb
utility will automatically generate an interface for TS:
interface Window {
readonly 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')
Read more about Security Considerations.
Modes and Environment Variables
All environment variables set as part of the import.meta
, so you can access them as follows: import.meta.env
.
If you are using a TypeScript and want to get Code completion you must add all the environment variables to the ImportMetaEnv
in types/vite-env.d.ts
.
The mode option is used to specify the value of import.meta.env.MODE
and the corresponding environment variables files that needs to be loaded.
By default, there are two modes:
production
is used by defaultdevelopment
is used bynpm run watch
script
When running building, 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.
Contribution
See Contributing Guide.