electron-packager
Package your Electron app into OS-specific bundles (.app
, .exe
, etc.) via JavaScript or the command line.
About
Electron Packager is a command line tool and Node.js library that bundles Electron-based application source code with a renamed Electron executable and supporting files into folders ready for distribution.
Note that packaged Electron applications can be relatively large. A zipped barebones OS X Electron application is around 40MB.
OPEN Open Source Project
Electron Packager is anIndividuals 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 asmas
)* - 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
This module requires Node.js 4.0 or higher to run.
# 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 an overview of the optional flags, run electron-packager --help
or see
usage.txt. For
detailed descriptions, see the API documentation.
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. If you put them in
the devDependencies
section of package.json
and specify the --prune
parameter, none of the
modules related to those dependencies will be copied in the app bundles. In addition, folders like
.git
and node_modules/.bin
will be ignored by default. You can use --ignore
to ignore files
and folders via a regular expression (not a glob pattern).
Examples include --ignore=\.gitignore
or --ignore="\.git(ignore|modules)"
.
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 globallyproductName
inpackage.json
has been set toFoo Bar
npm install
for theFoo 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 theproductName
inpackage.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
infoobar/Foo Bar-darwin-x64/
(since anout
directory was not specified, it used the current working directory)
- build the OS X
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 1.6 or later needs to be installed. On OS X, it is installable via Homebrew.
Related
- electron-builder - for creating installer wizards
- grunt-electron - grunt plugin for electron-packager
- electron-packager-interactive - an interactive CLI for electron-packager