The Dropbox media browser!

The only development dependency of this project is Node.js. So just make sure you have it installed. Then type few commands known to every Node developer...

git clone https://github.com/szwacz/electron-boilerplate.git
cd electron-boilerplate
npm install
npm start

... and boom! You have running desktop application on your screen.

There are two package.json files:

Sits on path: electron-boilerplate/package.json. Here you declare dependencies for your development environment and build scripts. This file is not distributed with real application!

Also here you declare the version of Electron runtime you want to use:

"devDependencies": {
  "electron-prebuilt": "^0.34.0"
}

Sits on path: electron-boilerplate/app/package.json. This is real manifest of your application. Declare your app dependencies here.

1. Native npm modules (those written in C, not JavaScript) need to be compiled, and here we have two different compilation targets for them. Those used in application need to be compiled against electron runtime, and all devDependencies need to be compiled against your locally installed node.js. Thanks to having two files this is trivial.
2. When you package the app for distribution there is no need to add up to size of the app with your devDependencies. Here those are always not included (because reside outside the app directory).

• app - code of your application goes here.
• config - place where you can declare environment specific stuff for your app.
• build - in this folder lands built, runnable application.
• releases - ready for distribution installers will land here.
• resources - resources needed for particular operating system.
• tasks - build and development environment scripts.
• data - when developing databases and cofig files will be stored here.

npm install

It will also download Electron runtime, and install dependencies for second package.json file inside app folder.

npm start

Remember to add your dependency to app/package.json file, so do:

cd app
npm install name_of_npm_module --save

Want to use native modules? This objective needs some extra work (rebuilding module for Electron). In this boilerplate it's fully automated, just use special command instead of standard npm install something when want to install native module.

npm run install-native -- name_of_native_module

This script when run first time will add electron-rebuild to your project. After that everything is wired and no further maintenance is necessary.

How about being future proof and using ES6 modules all the time in your app? Thanks to rollup you can do that. It will transpile the imports to proper require() statements, so even though ES6 modules aren't natively supported yet you can start using them today.

You can use it on those kinds of modules:

// Modules authored by you
import { myStuff } from './my_lib/my_stuff';
// Node.js native
import fs from 'fs';
// Electron native
import { app } from 'electron';
// Loaded from npm
import moment from 'moment';

The build script copies files from app to build directory and the application is started from build. Therefore if you want to use any special file/folder in your app make sure it will be copied via some of glob patterns in tasks/build.js:

var paths = {
  copyFromAppDir: [
    './node_modules/**',
    './vendor/**',
    './**/*.html',
    './**/*.+(jpg|png|svg)'
  ],
}

electron-boilerplate has preconfigured jasmine test runner. To run the tests go with standard:

npm test

You don't have to declare paths to spec files in any particular place. The runner will search through the project for all *.spec.js files and include them automatically.

Note: There are various icon and bitmap files in resources directory.

To make ready for distribution installer use command:

npm run release

It will start the packaging process for every operating system (Mac, Windows and Linux).

Building the app and creating the installer for windows requires editing the Electron.exe file. On OS X, you can install what you need using Homebrew:

brew install wine makensis mono

This can only be done on osx at the moment.

Copyright (c) 2016 Giuseppe Germinaro