electron-kit

Opinionated electron build tool.

Heavily inspired by desktop/desktop and react-scripts

File Structure

This project has a few expectations of the file structured used by your app.

Both JavaScript and TypeScript with React is supported everywhere, but we'll use TypeScript in the examples.

Required file structure:

preload.ts is required but can be empty if its not needed.

All files in static folder will be copied over, and index.html will be used as your entry point to your React app.

.electron-kit/
  config.js
src/
  main/
    index.ts
  renderer/
    index.tsx
    preload.ts
  static/
    index.html

Configuration

TODO

Compile Time Variables

Name	Value
VERSION	The version of your app, as specified in your package.json.
PROCESS_KIND	Used internally, but is set to main or renderer, depending on the process.

Runtime API

Warning: Electron will be deprecating shared globals between processes, you should instead looking to converting your API to use IPC methods instead.

Electron allows you to import dependencies even inside the renderer, and use this as if you were in the main process. However this tool does not keep node_modules/ in the final build so this method will longer work.

Instead in your main process you should register your modules to work in the renderer process.

// main
import kit from "electron-kit";
import Store from "electron-store";

const store = new Store();

kit.registerModule("store", store);

// renderer
import kit from "electron-kit";
const store = kit.importModule("store");

Use IPC methods (recommended)

// main
import { ipcMain } from "electron";
import Store from "electron-store";

ipcMain.handle(`store-get`, (e, key, defaultValue) => {
  return store.get(key, defaultValue);
});

ipcMain.handle(`store-set`, (e, key, val) => {
  return store.set(key, val);
});

ipcMain.handle(`store-delete`, (e, key) => {
  return store.delete(key);
});

// renderer
import { ipcRenderer } from "electron";

const store = {
  get(key: string, defaultValue?: string) {
    return ipcRenderer.invoke(`store-get`, key, defaultValue);
  },
  set<T>(key: string, val: T) {
    return ipcRenderer.invoke(`store-set`, key, val);
  },
  delete(key: string) {
    return ipcRenderer.invoke(`store-delete`, key);
  },
};

Typescript

electron-kit provides many runtime and compile time utilities. Typescript should pick up the Runtime API by itself. However to get type access to the compile time variables add a index.d.ts file to the root of your app and add the following:

/// <reference types="@a1motion/electron-kit/managed" />