5.2 KiB
Application Distribution
To distribute your app with Electron, you need to download Electron's prebuilt
binaries. Next, the folder
containing your app should be named app
and placed in Electron's resources
directory as shown in the following examples. Note that the location of
Electron's prebuilt binaries is indicated with electron/
in the examples
below.
On macOS:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/app
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
Then execute Electron.app
(or electron
on Linux, electron.exe
on Windows),
and Electron will start as your app. The electron
directory will then be
your distribution to deliver to final users.
Packaging Your App into a File
Apart from shipping your app by copying all of its source 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 Electron's resources directory like
below, and Electron will then try to read the archive and start from it.
On macOS:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/
└── app.asar
More details can be found in Application packaging.
Rebranding with Downloaded Binaries
After bundling your app into Electron, you will want to rebrand Electron before distributing it to users.
Windows
You can rename electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other
information with tools like rcedit.
macOS
You can rename Electron.app
to any name you want, and you also have to rename
the CFBundleDisplayName
, CFBundleIdentifier
and CFBundleName
fields in the
following files:
Electron.app/Contents/Info.plist
Electron.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist
You can also rename the helper app to avoid showing Electron Helper
in the
Activity Monitor, but make sure you have renamed the helper app's executable
file's name.
The structure of a renamed app would be like:
MyApp.app/Contents
├── Info.plist
├── MacOS/
│ └── MyApp
└── Frameworks/
└── MyApp Helper.app
├── Info.plist
└── MacOS/
└── MyApp Helper
Linux
You can rename the electron
executable to any name you like.
Packaging Tools
Apart from packaging your app manually, you can also choose to use third party packaging tools to do the work for you:
Rebranding by Rebuilding Electron from Source
It is also possible to rebrand Electron by changing the product name and
building it from source. To do this you need to modify the atom.gyp
file and
have a clean rebuild.
Creating a Custom Electron Fork
Creating a custom fork of Electron is almost certainly not something you will
need to do in order to build your app, even for "Production Level" applications.
Using a tool such as electron-packager
or electron-forge
will allow you to
"Rebrand" Electron without having to do these steps.
You need to fork Electron when you have custom C++ code that you have patched directly into Electron, that either cannot be upstreamed, or has been rejected from the official version. As maintainers of Electron, we very much would like to make your scenario work, so please try as hard as you can to get your changes into the official version of Electron, it will be much much easier on you, and we appreciate your help.
Creating a Custom Release with surf-build
-
Install Surf, via npm:
npm install -g surf-build@latest
-
Create a new S3 bucket and create the following empty directory structure:
- electron/ - symbols/ - dist/
-
Set the following Environment Variables:
ELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
- a token that can create releases on GitHubELECTRON_S3_ACCESS_KEY
,ELECTRON_S3_BUCKET
,ELECTRON_S3_SECRET_KEY
- the place where you'll upload Node.js headers as well as symbolsELECTRON_RELEASE
- Set totrue
and the upload part will run, leave unset andsurf-build
will do CI-type checks, appropriate to run for every pull request.CI
- Set totrue
or else it will failGITHUB_TOKEN
- set it to the same asELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
SURF_TEMP
- set toC:\Temp
on Windows to prevent path too long issuesTARGET_ARCH
- set toia32
orx64
-
In
script/upload.py
, you must setELECTRON_REPO
to your fork (MYORG/electron
), especially if you are a contributor to Electron proper. -
surf-build -r https://github.com/MYORG/electron -s YOUR_COMMIT -n 'surf-PLATFORM-ARCH'
-
Wait a very, very long time for the build to complete.