Multi Platform Build

Don't expect that you can build app for all platforms on one platform.

• If your app has native dependencies, it can be compiled only on the target platform. prebuild is a solution, but most node modules don't provide prebuilt binaries.

• OS Code Signing works only on MacOS. Cannot be fixed.

Don't think that mentioned issues are major, you should use build servers — e.g. AppVeyor to build Windows app and Travis to build MacOS/Linux apps.

See sample appveyor.yml to build Electron app for Windows. And sample .travis.yml to build Electron app for MacOS.

By default build for current platform and current arch. Use CLI flags --mac, --win, --linux to specify platforms. And --ia32, --x64 to specify arch.

For example, to build app for MacOS, Windows and Linux:

build -mwl

Build performed in parallel, so, it is highly recommended to not use npm task per platform (e.g. npm run dist:mac && npm run dist:win32), but specify multiple platforms/targets in one build command. You don't need to clean dist output before build — output directory is cleaned automatically.

MacOS

Use brew to install required packages.

To build app for Windows on MacOS:

brew install wine --without-x11
brew install mono

To build app for Linux on MacOS:

brew install gnu-tar graphicsmagick xz

To build rpm: brew install rpm.

Linux

To build app in distributable format for Linux:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y icnsutils graphicsmagick xz-utils

To build rpm: sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y rpm.

To build pacman: sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y bsdtar.

To build app for Windows on Linux:

• Install Wine (1.8+ is required):

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa -y
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y wine1.8
  

• Install Mono (4.2+ is required):

  sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
  echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y mono-devel ca-certificates-mono
  

To build app in 32 bit from a machine with 64 bit:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y gcc-multilib g++-multilib

Travis Linux

Trusty is required — default Travis Linux dist is outdated and icnsutils version is non-functional.

sudo: required
dist: trusty

Windows

Use Docker.