/electron-packager

Package and distribute your Electron app with OS-specific bundles (.app, .exe etc) via JS or CLI

Primary LanguageJavaScriptBSD 2-Clause "Simplified" LicenseBSD-2-Clause

electron-packager

Package your Electron app into OS-specific bundles (.app, .exe, etc.) via JavaScript or the command line.

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About

Electron Packager is a command line tool that packages electron app source code into executables like .app or .exe along with a copy of Electron.

Note that packaged Electron applications can be relatively large. A zipped barebones OS X Electron application is around 40MB.

Electron Packager is an OPEN Open Source Project

Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to the project to contribute as they see fit. This project is more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project.

See CONTRIBUTING.md and openopensource.org for more details.

Release Notes

Supported Platforms

Electron Packager is known to run on the following host platforms:

  • Windows (32/64 bit)
  • OS X
  • Linux (x86/x86_64)

It generates executables/bundles for the following target platforms:

  • Windows (also known as win32, for both 32/64 bit)
  • OS X (also known as darwin) / Mac App Store (also known as mas)*
  • Linux (for both x86/x86_64)

* Note for OS X / MAS target bundles: the .app bundle can only be signed when building on a host OS X platform.

Installation

# for use in npm scripts
npm install electron-packager --save-dev

# for use from cli
npm install electron-packager -g

Usage

From the Command Line

Running electron-packager from the command line has this basic form:

electron-packager <sourcedir> <appname> --platform=<platform> --arch=<arch> [optional flags...]

This will:

  • Find or download the correct release of Electron
  • Use that version of Electron to create a app in <out>/<appname>-<platform>-<arch> (this can be customized via an optional flag)

For details on the optional flags, run electron-packager --help or see usage.txt.

If appname is omitted, this will use the name specified by "productName" or "name" in the nearest package.json.

You should be able to launch the app on the platform you built for. If not, check your settings and try again.

Be careful not to include node_modules you don't want into your final app. electron-packager, electron-prebuilt and .git will be ignored by default. You can use --ignore to ignore files and folders via a regular expression. For example, --ignore=node_modules/package-to-ignore or --ignore="node_modules/(some-package[0-9]*|dev-dependency)".

Example

Let's assume that you have made an app based on the electron-quick-start repository on a OS X or Linux host platform with the following file structure:

foobar
├─package.json
├─index.html
├[…other files, like LICENSE…]
└─script.js

…and that the following is true:

  • electron-packager is installed globally
  • productName in package.json has been set to Foo Bar
  • npm install for the Foo Bar app has been run at least once

When one runs the following command for the first time in the foobar directory:

electron-packager . --all

electron-packager will do the following:

  • Use the current directory for the sourcedir
  • Infer the appname from the productName in package.json
  • Download all supported target platforms and arches of Electron using the installed electron-prebuilt version (and cache the downloads in ~/.electron)
  • For the darwin build, as an example:
    • build the OS X Foo Bar.app
    • place Foo Bar.app in foobar/Foo Bar-darwin-x64/ (since an out directory was not specified, it used the current working directory)

The file structure now looks like:

foobar
├┬Foo Bar-darwin-x64
│├┬Foo Bar.app
││└[…Mac app contents…]
│├─LICENSE
│└─version
├[…other application bundles, like "Foo Bar-win32-x64" (sans quotes)…]
├─package.json
├─index.html
├[…other files, like LICENSE…]
└─script.js

The Foo Bar.app folder generated can be executed by a system running OS X, which will start the packaged Electron app. This is also true of the Windows x64 build on a system running a new enough version of Windows for a 64-bit system (via Foo Bar-win32-x64/Foo Bar.exe), and so on.

Programmatic API

Building Windows apps from non-Windows platforms

Building an Electron app for the Windows platform with a custom icon requires editing the Electron.exe file. Currently, electron-packager uses node-rcedit to accomplish this. A Windows executable is bundled in that node package and needs to be run in order for this functionality to work, so on non-Windows host platforms, Wine needs to be installed. On OS X, it is installable via Homebrew.

As of node-rcedit 0.4.0, an additional DLL is required, MSVCP120.dll. This is available in the Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable Package, but the easiest way to install it is to use winetricks:

winetricks -q vcrun2013

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