This projct is bsed on the electron boiler plate in respomse to this years NASA Space App challenges in the category https://2017.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/our-ecological-neighborhood/where-genes-flow/detail.

Actually the hackerton was a complete failure since the location in Berlin was cancelled on a very short notice. At the end i was my own team working from my home office; which does not matches the spirit of the hackerton at all.

But finally i decided to continue the thing.

Quick start

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

Structure of the project

## The build pipeline

Build process is founded upon [gulp](https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp) task runner and [rollup](https://github.com/rollup/rollup) bundler. There are two entry files for your code: `src/background.js` and `src/app.js`. Rollup will follow all `import` statements starting from those files and compile code of the whole dependency tree into one `.js` file for each entry point.

You can [add as many more entry points as you like](https://github.com/szwacz/electron-boilerplate/blob/master/tasks/build_app.js#L16) (e.g. to split your app into modules).

By the way, [rollup has a lot of plugins](https://github.com/rollup/rollup/wiki/Plugins). You can add them in [this file](https://github.com/szwacz/electron-boilerplate/blob/master/tasks/bundle.js#L29).

## Adding npm modules to your app

Remember to respect the split between `dependencies` and `devDependencies` in `package.json` file. Only modules listed in `dependencies` will be included into distributable app when you run the release script.

Side note: If the module you want to use in your app is a native one (not pure JavaScript but compiled C code or something) you should first  run `npm install name_of_npm_module --save` and then `npm run postinstall` to rebuild the module for Electron. This needs to be done only once when you're first time installing the module. Later on postinstall script will fire automatically with every `npm install`.

## Working with modules

Thanks to [rollup](https://github.com/rollup/rollup) you can (and should) use ES6 modules for all code in `src` folder. But because ES6 modules still aren't natively supported you can't use them in the `app` folder.

Use ES6 syntax in the `src` folder like this:
```js
import myStuff from './my_lib/my_stuff';

But use CommonJS syntax in app folder. So the code from above should look as follows:

var myStuff = require('./my_lib/my_stuff');

Testing

Unit tests

npm test

Using electron-mocha test runner with the chai assertion library. This task searches for all files in src directory which respect pattern *.spec.js (so you can put unit test file in the same directory as the tested file).

End to end tests

npm run e2e

Using mocha test runner and spectron. This task searches for all files in e2e directory which respect pattern *.e2e.js.

Code coverage

npm run coverage

Using istanbul code coverage tool.

You can set the reporter(s) by setting ISTANBUL_REPORTERS environment variable (defaults to text-summary and html). The report directory can be set with ISTANBUL_REPORT_DIR (defaults to coverage).

Continuous integration

Electron can be plugged into CI systems. Here two CIs are preconfigured for you. Travis CI tests on macOS and Linux, App Veyor tests on Windows.

Making a release

To package your app into an installer use command:

npm run release

It will start the packaging process for operating system you are running this command on. Ready for distribution file will be outputted to dist directory.

You can create Windows installer only when running on Windows, the same is true for Linux and macOS. So to generate all three installers you need all three operating systems.

All packaging actions are handled by electron-builder. It has a lot of customization options, which you can declare under "build" key in package.json file.

License

Released under the MIT license.