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electron.md

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Using Electron

Electron is a platform bridge allowing you to build desktop applications using web technologies.

Its runtime is based on Node.js and Chromium, and allows you to package standalone applications for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Electron applications are composed by 2 main parts:

  • The main process that is executing the electron.main.ts script, and that spawns one (or more) instances of BrowserWindow to run web pages in dedicated render processes.
  • The render process that renders your web page (your Angular application). There is as many render processes as there is BrowserWindow instances. One special feature of Electron is that your web pages can make use of the Node.js API to manage low-level interaction with the host operating system.

Read more about specific features of Electron application architecture in the official documentation.

Common tasks

Important note: Electron support in ngX-Rocket is considered experimental at this point, and though it includes all you need to build complete applications, the developer experience and provided tooling may is very rough at this stage and will be improved other time (you can also help us to accelerate development, see ngx-rocket/generator-ngx-rocket#418 😉)

Running the application

Use these commands to run the application:

npm run electron:build && npm run electron:run

To run an instance of your application with live reload enabled, you have to run these commands in separate processes:

npm run start                        // start the Angular app server
npm run electron:compile -- --watch  // recompile Electron code automatically

And then start the electron app in live reload mode:

npm run electron:run -- --serve

Packaging applications for distribution

To build standalone packages of your application for all your supported targets, run:

npm run electron:package

Alternatively, you can build a package for one specific target platform using:

npm run electron:package:<windows|mac|linux>

The build packages will be then located in the dist-packages folder.

Note: in order to build Windows packages from non-Windows platform, you need to install Wine 1.6 or later. See electron-packager documentation for more details.