Its ability to support developers with automatic scaffolding, rebuilding of native modules, packaging, and creation of installers is amazing and has this guide’s recommendation. To solve that problem, the community has started work on a CLI tool called electron-forge. As interest in Electron grew and support for more distribution methods was added, creating a build pipeline from scratch became an increasingly daunting task.

Traditionally, developers would use bite-sized modules to build custom build pipelines, combining modules such as electron-packager, electron-winstaller, or electron-installer-dmg into artisanal scripts. In the spirit of Node.js development, the solution for both tasks comes in the form of npm modules. In this process, a binary with the app’s name and icon is created for each platform, bundling up the whole application, including all JavaScript files and dependencies. First, the application needs to be packaged. Shipping an Electron application therefore consists of two steps.

You will likely also want to change the icon and create a single installer file, ready to be downloaded by potential customers. However, once you ship your application to users, the name Electron should never show up in any Windows task manager or macOS activity monitor. The Electron runtime, launched by executing Electron.exe or Electron.app, loads the entry point JavaScript file and only then starts behaving like “your” application. Binaries, Installers, and Updatesĭuring development, an Electron application behaves just like a Node process.

Electron installer windows