Electron on Windows

Notes on building electron on Windows!

The goal is to take the Electron App (which is just a NodeJS express server with some additional websocket services we've added) and build a binary that runs in the Windows environment.

Development Environment Requirements

• SourceTree 3.0+ for Windows (supports GitLab)
• Personal Access Token (PAT) created in GitLab repo by administrator, sent to developer
• Git for Windows, including Git Bash installed globally
• NodeJS for Windows installed globally
• A working shell (powershell, gitbash, or something else) that has Windows paths and environment variables set in a compatible way with a Unix-y setup.
• Visual Studio Code terminal, loading one of the above shells

Path Issues

• Git Bash has to be in the Path
• NodeJS has to be in the Path
• Powershell or Git Bash (a wrapper around CMD) use windows-style paths
• WSL shell runs in a LINUX environment, and isn't suitable

Script Execution Issues

• running a program under Windows is different; the scripts crash
• getting debug output from NodeJS under Windows seems different too (possibly it's due to missing environment variables to enable debug output from Node?)

Electron Packager

• The tool used to create the binary for windows must run on Windows.
• The packager works on a built directory that contains all the files that are served by the standalone server appliance app (meme.app on MacOS).
• To create the built directory, we need to be able to run webpack from the command line before we can even run the packager.
• Currently it doesn't work, but maybe it's a day to do it? Maybe three days? Hard to tell.