electron-issues.md

I spent 5 evenings trying to get electron-forge to build this app for windows but to no avail. This is just a small log of some of the issues I faced which might become useful in the future?

[Mon 15 Feb]

• Problems installing winehq-stable on pop_os
  • resolved by installing via pop!_shop (oops)
• electron-forge packaged application throwing error something along the lines of Unable to load clientPreload.js ... utp-native.node is not a valid Win32 Application
• I thought that perhaps it was because I built a 64bit app so I tried building with --arch=ia32 to no avail.

[Tue 16 Feb]

• No documented attempts via google history but likely continued failed attempts on both linux and windows machine

[Wed 17 Feb]

• Continued investigating building Windows app from linux, attempted building on Windows laptop too but that would run into an issues with rcedit.exe unable to load or similar
• Thought that Squirrel.Windows would help so tried that but had missing mono dependency. Turns out Squirrel doesn't do what I want anyway
• A lot of attempts and reattempts of building... I probably just changed random things, installed random dependencies but to no effect
• Ended to day looking to a docker-wine image to try and resolve possible wine related issues since the most consistent issue was it complaining about not a Win32 Application

[Thu 18 Feb]

• Found a couple docker-wine images but they produced additional errors related to the wine installation. something like winex64 not found.
• Attempted building with --arch=ia32 flag again, but this time I would get errors related to node-gyp rebuild and also fatal error: bits/libc-header-start.h: No such file or directory
  • resolved by installing sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib 32 bit libraries
• Now i'm onto something, but rebuilding throws fatal error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory
  • resolved by installing more libraries sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib
• This build also fails with the same utp-native error, I tried the above on windows as well but again same error
• I thought maybe on windows the issue was WSL because after all it is a linux environment, so I installed Git Bash and tried again from there. Git Bash and node installed, I tried running the package script but apparantly snowpack cli doesnt exist despite installing node_modules!
• I gave up at this point.

[Fri 19 Feb]

• I read something online with someone recommending electron-builder over electron-forge so I thought I must give it a go

• Setup a basic config for electron-builder and ran it once, their docker containers really helped too. Another error though, Not allowed to load local resource 'app.asar/resources/app/build/index.html'...

  • resolved by adding files array to electron-builder.yml to specify which folders to include in package (build was being ignored before because it is the default output directory for electron-builder)

• Success! In the end I'm still not sure what was wrong with electron-forge and my application but electron-builder came through at the end. I will continue to use electron-forge for local development though