Application Distribution
Application Distribution
To distribute your app with Electron, you need to download Electron’s prebuilt binaries. Next, the folder containing your app should be named app
and placed in Electron’s resources directory as shown in the following examples. Note that the location of Electron’s prebuilt binaries is indicated with electron/
in the examples below.
On macOS:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/app/ ├── package.json ├── main.js └── index.html
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/app ├── package.json ├── main.js └── index.html
Then execute Electron.app
(or electron
on Linux, electron.exe
on Windows), and Electron will start as your app. The electron
directory will then be your distribution to deliver to final users.
Packaging Your App into a File
Apart from shipping your app by copying all of its source files, you can also package your app into an asar archive to avoid exposing your app’s source code to users.
To use an asar
archive to replace the app
folder, you need to rename the archive to app.asar
, and put it under Electron’s resources directory like below, and Electron will then try to read the archive and start from it.
On macOS:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/ └── app.asar
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/ └── app.asar
More details can be found in Application packaging.
Rebranding with Downloaded Binaries
After bundling your app into Electron, you will want to rebrand Electron before distributing it to users.
Windows
You can rename electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other information with tools like rcedit.
macOS
You can rename Electron.app
to any name you want, and you also have to rename the CFBundleDisplayName
, CFBundleIdentifier
and CFBundleName
fields in the following files:
Electron.app/Contents/Info.plist
Electron.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist
You can also rename the helper app to avoid showing Electron Helper
in the Activity Monitor, but make sure you have renamed the helper app’s executable file’s name.
The structure of a renamed app would be like:
MyApp.app/Contents ├── Info.plist ├── MacOS/ │ └── MyApp └── Frameworks/ ├── MyApp Helper EH.app | ├── Info.plist | └── MacOS/ | └── MyApp Helper EH ├── MyApp Helper NP.app | ├── Info.plist | └── MacOS/ | └── MyApp Helper NP └── MyApp Helper.app ├── Info.plist └── MacOS/ └── MyApp Helper
Linux
You can rename the electron
executable to any name you like.
Packaging Tools
Apart from packaging your app manually, you can also choose to use third party packaging tools to do the work for you:
Rebranding by Rebuilding Electron from Source
It is also possible to rebrand Electron by changing the product name and building it from source. To do this you need to modify the atom.gyp
file and have a clean rebuild.
grunt-build-atom-shell
Manually checking out Electron’s code and rebuilding could be complicated, so a Grunt task has been created that will handle this automatically: grunt-build-atom-shell.
This task will automatically handle editing the .gyp
file, building from source, then rebuilding your app’s native Node modules to match the new executable name.
Creating a Custom Electron Fork
Creating a custom fork of Electron is almost certainly not something you will need to do in order to build your app, even for “Production Level” applications. Using a tool such as electron-packager
or electron-builder
will allow you to “Rebrand” Electron without having to do these steps.
You need to fork Electron when you have custom C++ code that you have patched directly into Electron, that either cannot be upstreamed, or has been rejected from the official version. As maintainers of Electron, we very much would like to make your scenario work, so please try as hard as you can to get your changes into the official version of Electron, it will be much much easier on you, and we appreciate your help.
Creating a Custom Release with surf-build
-
Install Surf, via npm:
npm install -g surf-build@latest
-
Create a new S3 bucket and create the following empty directory structure:
- atom-shell/ - symbols/ - dist/
-
Set the following Environment Variables:
-
ELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
- a token that can create releases on GitHub -
ELECTRON_S3_ACCESS_KEY
,ELECTRON_S3_BUCKET
,ELECTRON_S3_SECRET_KEY
- the place where you’ll upload node.js headers as well as symbols -
ELECTRON_RELEASE
- Set totrue
and the upload part will run, leave unset andsurf-build
will just do CI-type checks, appropriate to run for every pull request. -
CI
- Set totrue
or else it will fail -
GITHUB_TOKEN
- set it to the same asELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
-
SURF_TEMP
- set toC:\Temp
on Windows to prevent path too long issues -
TARGET_ARCH
- set toia32
orx64
-
In
script/upload.py
, you must setELECTRON_REPO
to your fork (MYORG/electron
), especially if you are a contributor to Electron proper. -
surf-build -r https://github.com/MYORG/electron -s YOUR_COMMIT -n 'surf-PLATFORM-ARCH'
-
Wait a very, very long time for the build to complete.
© 2013–2017 GitHub Inc.
Licensed under the MIT license.
https://electron.atom.io/docs/tutorial/application-distribution/