Package your Electron app into OS-specific bundles (.app
, .exe
, etc.) via JavaScript or the command line. Supports building Windows, Linux or Mac executables.
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.
This module was developed as part of Dat, a grant funded non-profit open source project. It is maintained by volunteers. If you are benefitting from this module please consider making contributions back.
Note that packaged Electron applications can be relatively large. A zipped barebones OS X Electron application is around 40MB.
# for use in npm scripts
npm install electron-packager --save-dev
# for use from cli
npm install electron-packager -g
Running electron-packager from the command line has this basic form:
electron-packager <sourcedir> <appname> --platform=<platform> --arch=<arch> --version=<Electron version> [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.
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/electron-packager
or --ignore="node_modules/(electron-packager|electron-prebuilt)"
.
Given the app FooBar
with the following file structure:
foobar
├─package.json
└┬src
├─index.html
├─script.js
└─style.css
When one runs the following command for the first time in the foobar
directory:
electron-packager . FooBar --platform=darwin --arch=x64 --version=0.28.2
electron-packager
will do the following:
- downloads Electron 0.28.2 for OS X on x64 (and caches the download in
~/.electron
) - builds the OS X
FooBar.app
- places
FooBar.app
infoobar/FooBar-darwin-x64/
(since anout
directory was not specified)
The file structure now looks like:
foobar
├┬FooBar-darwin-x64
│├┬FooBar.app
││└[…Mac app contents…]
│├─LICENSE
│└─version
├─package.json
└┬src
├─index.html
├─script.js
└─style.css
The FooBar.app
folder generated can be executed by a system running OS X, which will start the packaged Electron app.
var packager = require('electron-packager')
packager(opts, function done (err, appPath) { })
Required
dir
- String
The source directory.
name
- String
The application name.
platform
- String
Allowed values: linux, win32, darwin, all
Not required if all
is used.
Arbitrary combinations of individual platforms are also supported via a comma-delimited string or array of strings.
The non-all
values correspond to the platform names used by Electron releases.
arch
- String
Allowed values: ia32, x64, all
Not required if all
is used.
The non-all
values correspond to the architecture names used by Electron releases.
version
- String
Electron version (without the 'v') - for example, 0.33.9
. See Electron releases for valid versions.
Optional
all
- Boolean
When true
, sets both arch
and platform
to all
.
app-bundle-id
- String
app-version
- String
asar
- Boolean
asar-unpack
- String
asar-unpack-dir
- String
Unpacks the dir to app.asar.unpacked directory whose names exactly match this string. The asar-unpack-dir
is relative to dir
.
For example, asar-unpack-dir=sub_dir
will unpack the directory /<dir>/sub_dir
.
build-version
- String
cache
- String
helper-bundle-id
- String
icon
- String
Currently you must look for conversion tools in order to supply an icon in the format required by the platform:
- OS X:
.icns
- Windows:
.ico
(See below for details on non-Windows platforms) - Linux: this option is not required, as the dock/window list icon is set via the icon option in the BrowserWindow contructor. Setting the icon in the file manager is not currently supported.
If the file extension is omitted, it is auto-completed to the correct extension based on the platform, including when --platform=all
is in effect.
ignore
- RegExp
out
- String
overwrite
- Boolean
prune
- Boolean
sign
- String
app-category-type
- String
The application category type, as shown in the Finder via View -> Arrange by Application Category when viewing the Applications directory (OS X only).
For example, app-category-type=public.app-category.developer-tools
will set the application category to Developer Tools.
Valid values are listed in Apple's documentation.
version-string
- Object
Object hash of application metadata to embed into the executable (Windows only):
CompanyName
LegalCopyright
FileDescription
OriginalFilename
FileVersion
ProductVersion
ProductName
InternalName
err
- Error
Contains errors, if any.
appPath
- String
Path to the newly created application.
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 platforms, Wine needs to be installed. On OS X, it is installable via Homebrew.
- electron-builder - for creating installer wizards
- grunt-electron - grunt plugin for electron-packager
- electron-packager-interactive - an interactive CLI for electron-packager