Application distribution

To distribute your app with atom-shell, you should name the folder of your app as app, and put it under atom-shell's resources directory (on OS X it is Atom.app/Contents/Resources/, and on Linux and Windows it is resources/), like this:

On OS X:

atom-shell/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html

On Windows and Linux:

atom-shell/resources/app
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html

Then execute Atom.app (or atom on Linux, and atom.exe on Windows), and atom-shell will start as your app. The atom-shell directory would then be your distribution that should be delivered to final users.

Packaging your app into a file

Apart from shipping your app by copying all its sources files, you can also package your app into an asar archive to avoid exposing your app's source code to users.

To use an asar archive to replace the app folder, you need to rename the archive to app.asar, and put it under atom-shell's resources directory like bellow, and atom-shell will then try read the archive and start from it.

On OS X:

atom-shell/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar

On Windows and Linux:

atom-shell/resources/
└── app.asar

More details can be found in Application packaging.

Rebranding with downloaded binaries

After bundling your app into atom-shell, you will want to rebrand atom-shell before distributing it to users.

If you don't care about the executable name on Windows or the helper process name on OS X, you can simply rename the downloaded binaries, and there is also a grunt task that can download prebuilt atom-shell binaries for your current platform automatically: grunt-download-atom-shell.

Windows

You can not rename the atom.exe otherwise native modules will not load. But you can edit the executable's icon and other information with tools like rcedit or ResEdit.

If you don't use any native Node module, it is fine to rename atom.exe to any name you want.

OS X

You can rename Atom.app to whatever you want, and you also have to rename the CFBundleDisplayName, CFBundleIdentifier and CFBundleName fields in following manifest files if they have these keys:

Atom.app/Contents/Info.plist
Atom.app/Contents/Frameworks/Atom Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist

Linux

You can rename the atom executable to whatever you want.

Rebranding by rebuilding atom-shell from source

The best way to rename atom-shell is to change the product name and then build from source. To do this you need to override the GYP_DEFINES environment variable and have a clean rebuild:

Windows

> set "GYP_DEFINES=project_name=myapp product_name=MyApp"
> python script\bootstrap.py
> python script\build.py -c Release -t myapp

Bash

$ export GYP_DEFINES="project_name=myapp product_name=MyApp"
$ script/bootstrap.py
$ script/build.py -c Release -t myapp

grunt-build-atom-shell

Manually checking out atom-shell's code and rebuilding could be complicated, so a Grunt task has been created that will handle this automatically: grunt-build-atom-shell.

This task will automatically handle editing the .gyp file, building from source, then rebuilding your app's native Node modules to match the new executable name.

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