electron-react-starter

Boilerplate to start electron project with a bunch of awesome react technologies.

Electron application boilerplate based on React, Redux, React Router, Webpack, React Transform HMR for rapid application development

This project was forked from repository electron-react-boilerplate, and update with some features, such as more structuring files, less support, css modular, auto update, build settings and so on.

Screenshot

Install

• Note: requires a node version >= 6 and an npm version >= 3.

First, clone the repo via git:

git clone https://github.com/alcat2008/electron-react-starter.git your-project-name

And then install dependencies. ProTip: Install with yarn for faster and safer installation

$ cd your-project-name && npm install

💡 In order to remove boilerplate sample code, simply run npm run cleanup. After this is run, the initial sample boilerplate code will be removed in order for a clean project for starting custom dev

Run

Run these two commands simultaneously in different console tabs.

$ npm run hot-server
$ npm run start-hot

or run two servers with one command

$ npm run dev

Log

Log state enable is currently persisted by localStorage. You can enable this using localStorage.debug:

localStorage.debug = 'electron-react:*'

And then refresh the page.

Auto update

Auto update is implemented by electron-simple-updater. The URL to updates.json file should be setting in package.json, you can set this link in package.json:updater.url.

Automatic updates on macOS is not avaliable for the moment, you should sign the application for yourself.

IPC

The service for IPC is provided for both main and render process, with the same name ipc.js.

DevTools

Toggle Chrome DevTools

• OS X: Cmd Alt I or F12
• Linux: Ctrl Shift I or F12
• Windows: Ctrl Shift I or F12

See electron-debug for more information.

DevTools extension

This boilerplate is included following DevTools extensions:

• Devtron - Install via electron-debug.
• React Developer Tools - Install via electron-devtools-installer.
• Redux DevTools - Install via electron-devtools-installer.

You can find the tabs on Chrome DevTools.

If you want to update extensions version, please set UPGRADE_EXTENSIONS env, just run:

$ UPGRADE_EXTENSIONS=1 npm run dev

# For Windows
$ set UPGRADE_EXTENSIONS=1 && npm run dev

Debug main process

It is recommended to debug main process with VSCode. For more on the tutorial, please consult the blog 使用 VSCode 调试基于 ES6 的 electron 主进程.

CSS Modules

This boilerplate out of the box is configured to use css-modules.

All .less file extensions will use css-modules if is located under styles/views.

Packaging

To package apps for the local platform:

$ npm run package

To package apps for all platforms:

First, refer to Multi Platform Build for dependencies.

Then,

$ npm run package-all

To package apps with options:

$ npm run package -- --[option]

Further commands

To run the application without packaging run

$ npm run build
$ npm start

To run End-to-End Test

$ npm run build
$ npm run test-e2e

Options

See electron-builder CLI Usage

Module Structure

This boilerplate uses a two package.json structure.

1. If the module is native to a platform or otherwise should be included with the published package (i.e. bcrypt, openbci), it should be listed under dependencies in ./src/package.json.
2. If a module is imported by another module, include it in dependencies in ./package.json. See this ESLint rule.
3. Otherwise, modules used for building, testing and debugging should be included in devDependencies in ./package.json.

Static Type Checking

This project comes with Flow support out of the box! You can annotate your code with types, get Flow errors as ESLint errors, and get type errors during runtime during development. Types are completely optional.

Native-like UI

If you want to have native-like User Interface (OS X El Capitan and Windows 10), react-desktop may perfect suit for you.

How to keep the boilerplate updated

If your application is a fork from this repo, you can add this repo to another git remote:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/alcat2008/electron-react-starter.git

Then, use git to merge some latest commits:

git pull upstream master

How to install native modules

npm install --save-dev electron-rebuild

# Every time you run "npm install", run this
./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild

# On Windows if you have trouble, try:
./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild.cmd

Questions

If appears error when run npm run dev, Error:

ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/Users/alcat/github/electron-react-starter/node_modules/electron/path.txt'

just execute command below

cd node_modules/electron && node install.js