@enmove/run-electron

A utility function to create a simple BrowserWindow in electron.

A simple helper to run an electron main process.

Usage

Firstly, create a .js file for an electron main process, for example, index.js or start-electron.js. This file will be invoked as you runs electron CLI like following:

# dot (.) for `index.js`
$ electron .
# or, specify the file name
$ electron start-electron.js

In the main process file, import run-electron module to get runElectron function, which is the default export of this module, and invoke it with the entry URL (either a local HTML file, or remote address) with proper protocol ("file:/", "http://", or "https://"). In addition, you can specify the BrowserWindow configration to customize your electron window:

// Starts the electron app
require("@enmove/run-electron")(
    `file://${__dirname}/dist/index.html`,

    // The BrowserWindow configuration
    {
        width: 1024,
        height: 768,
    }
);

Working with webpack-dev-server

In development process, you may want to use webpack-dev-server rather than watch mode and load the entry html file from the dev server. By doing this, not only your work-in-progress application code no longer needs to be emitted to the storage, but also it enables you to use live-reloading that comes with webpack's dev server.

To achieve this, you have to deal with following tasks:

1. Run two processes simultaneously.
   • The dev server process, and the electron main process
2. Open BrowserWindow after the dev server starts serving files.

Running two processes can be effortlessly done with one of the npm helper tools like npm-run-all, which adds a bin to run two or more npm scripts in a parallel way.

$ yarn add -D npm-run-all

With npm-run-all, add following scripts to your package.json:

{
    "scripts": {
        "start": "run-p start:dev-server start:electron",
        "start:dev-server": "webpack-dev-server --mode development",
        "start:electron": "electron ."
    }
}

So, what make it possible to solve the second task? Fortunately, if you provide a URL with http or https protocol to runElectron function, it automatically checks the availability of the server and keeps reconnecting until it becomes actually online.

// Starts the electron app with webpack dev server
require("@enmove/run-electron")(
    `http://localhost:3030`,
    {
        width: 1024,
        height: 768,
    }
);

See also

• BrowserWindow | Electron
• Building an Electron application with create-react-app

Additional info

This package is included in:

• for-electron