remote

The remote module provides a simple way to do inter-process communication between the renderer process and the main process.

In Electron, only GUI-unrelated modules are available in the renderer process. Without the remote module, users who wanted to call a main process API in the renderer process would have to explicitly send inter-process messages to the main process. With the remote module, users can invoke methods of main process object without explicitly sending inter-process messages, similar to Java's RMI.

An example of creating a browser window in renderer process:

var remote = require('remote');
var BrowserWindow = remote.require('browser-window');
var win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 800, height: 600 });
win.loadUrl('https://github.com');

Remote objects

Each object (including functions) returned by the remote module represents an object in the main process (we call it a remote object or remote function). When you invoke methods of a remote object, call a remote function, or create a new object with the remote constructor (function), you are actually sending synchronous inter-process messages.

In the example above, both BrowserWindow and win were remote objects and new BrowserWindow didn't create a BrowserWindow object in the renderer process. Instead, it created a BrowserWindow object in the main process and returned the corresponding remote object in the renderer process, namely the win object.

Lifetime of remote objects

Electron makes sure that as long as the remote object in the renderer process lives (in other words, has not been garbage collected), the corresponding object in the main process would never be released. When the remote object has been garbage collected, the corresponding object in the main process would be dereferenced.

If the remote object is leaked in renderer process (e.g. stored in a map but never freed), the corresponding object in the main process would also be leaked, so you should be very careful not to leak remote objects.

Primary value types like strings and numbers, however, are sent by copy.

Passing callbacks to the main process

Some APIs in the main process accept callbacks, and it would be tempting to pass callbacks when calling a remote function. The remote module does support doing this, but you should also be extremely careful with this.

First, in order to avoid deadlocks, the callbacks passed to the main process are called asynchronously, so you should not expect the main process to get the return value of the passed callbacks.

Second, the callbacks passed to the main process will not get released automatically after they are called. Instead, they will persistent until the main process garbage-collects them.

For example, the following code seems innocent at first glance. It installs a callback for the close event on a remote object:

var remote = require('remote');
remote.getCurrentWindow().on('close', function() {
  // blabla...
});

The problem is that the callback would be stored in the main process until you explicitly uninstall it! So each time you reload your window, the callback would be installed again and previous callbacks would just leak. To make things worse, since the context of previously installed callbacks have been released, when the close event was emitted, exceptions would be raised in the main process.

Generally, unless you are clear what you are doing, you should always avoid passing callbacks to the main process.

Remote buffer

An instance of node's Buffer is an object, so when you get a Buffer from the main process, what you get is indeed a remote object (let's call it remote buffer), and everything would just follow the rules of remote objects.

However you should remember that although a remote buffer behaves like the real Buffer, it's not a Buffer at all. If you pass a remote buffer to node APIs that accept a Buffer, you should assume the remote buffer would be treated like a normal object, instead of a Buffer.

For example, you can call BrowserWindow.capturePage in the renderer process, which returns a Buffer by calling the passed callback:

var remote = require('remote');
var fs = require('fs');
remote.getCurrentWindow().capturePage(function(image) {
  var buf = image.toPng();
  fs.writeFile('/tmp/screenshot.png', buf, function(err) {
    console.log(err);
  });
});

But you may be surprised to find that the file written was corrupted. This is because when you called fs.writeFile, thinking that buf was a Buffer when in fact it was a remote buffer, and it was converted to string before it was written to the file. Since buf contained binary data and could not be represented by a UTF-8 encoded string, the written file was corrupted.

The work-around is to write the buf in the main process, where it is a real Buffer:

var remote = require('remote');
remote.getCurrentWindow().capturePage(function(image) {
  var buf = image.toPng();
  remote.require('fs').writeFile('/tmp/screenshot.png', buf, function(err) {
    console.log(err);
  });
});

The same thing could happen for all native types, but usually it would just throw a type error. The Buffer deserves your special attention because it might be converted to string, and APIs accepting Buffer usually accept string too, and data corruption could happen when it contains binary data.

remote.require(module)

module String

Returns the object returned by require(module) in the main process.

remote.getCurrentWindow()

Returns the BrowserWindow object which this web page belongs to.

remote.getCurrentWebContent()

Returns the WebContents object of this web page.

remote.getGlobal(name)

name String

Returns the global variable of name (e.g. global[name]) in the main process.

remote.process

Returns the process object in the main process. This is the same as remote.getGlobal('process'), but gets cached.

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