https://github.com/atom-archive/electron-starter

Example Electron app
https://github.com/atom-archive/electron-starter

Last synced: 15 days ago
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Example Electron app

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/atom-archive/electron-starter
• Owner: atom-archive
• License: mit
• Archived: true
• Created: 2014-11-12T17:59:42.000Z (about 10 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2016-07-06T04:27:44.000Z (over 8 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-08-01T16:23:00.564Z (3 months ago)
• Language: CoffeeScript
• Homepage:
• Size: 2.04 MB
• Stars: 531
• Watchers: 21
• Forks: 65
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE.md

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README

        
# THIS REPO IS DEPRECATED

This repo represents the "old way" of creating and publishing Electron applications, based on Atom's build process - while this way still works and there are still some good ideas in this repo, it's actually far easier to use [electron-prebuilt](https://github.com/mafintosh/electron-prebuilt) and [electron-packager](https://github.com/maxogden/electron-packager) to get started.

# Electron Starter App

electron-starter is a base application that you can use to get started writing your own cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux) Desktop apps via Electron. This template is extracted from the Atom source code, cleaned up to be more generic, and to be a great starting point for a production app.

### Getting Started

Everything in Electron Starter is configured via the `package.json` file - there are some extra fields that are of interest:

* `name` - The name for your app that will be used in the build tools. Make it something simple.

* `productName` - The name of your product - your executable will be called this (i.e. "MyApp.app")

The default project is called EightOhEight (get it? Cause it's a sample(r)).

Once you've set that up, do:

1. `script/bootstrap` - Run this once per checkout.

2. `script/build` - Run this whenever you change package.json or change early startup code

3. `script/run` - Run the app. Use this for running the app in developer mode

Another useful script is `script/grunt`, which will run the local version of Grunt. `script/grunt --help` will tell you the list of available tasks.

### Using JavaScript ES6

JavaScript ES6 / ESNext is available via the Babel project for almost all files except for very early in startup. To use it, add `'use babel';` to the top of your file. Check out https://babeljs.io for more information. 

### What's the "browser" vs "renderer" code?

Electron has (at least) two separate contexts - when your app first starts up, it is running in a DOM-less node.js loop - there are no windows. This is called the *Browser* context. The built-in code proceeds to start up a `BrowserWindow` object, which then creates a *Rendering* context, which is what you are more used to - it's got the Chrome DevTools and a DOM, yet it can *still* use node.js, as well as several Electron APIs that are made available. Check out the [documentation for Electron](https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/tree/master/docs/api) for more about what you can do.

Most of your app's code should ideally live in the *Rendering* context, because the Browser context is difficult to debug and test - there is no Chrome DevTools, solely printf-based debugging.

### Why does `$MY_FAVORITE_LIBRARY` not work / do weird stuff?

Some JavaScript libraries try to detect whether they're in node.js via probing for `module` or `require`, and assume that they aren't in a browser. You might find that you need to patch these libraries to always operate in Browser Mode.