Atom Shell Installer Assets

This module simply contains the assets necessary to create Atom Shell application installers.

Sign your installer or else bad things will happen

For development / internal use, creating installers without a signature is okay, but for a production app you need to sign your application. Internet Explorer's SmartScreen filter will block your app from being downloaded, and many anti-virus vendors will consider your app as malware unless you obtain a valid cert.

Any certificate valid for "Authenticode Code Signing" will work here, but if you get the right kind of code certificate, you can also opt-in to Windows Error Reporting. This MSDN page has the latest links on where to get a WER-compatible certificate. The "Standard Code Signing" certificate is sufficient for this purpose.

Handling Squirrel Events

Squirrel will spawn your app with command line flags on first run, updates, and uninstalls. it is very important that your app handle these events as early as possible, and quit immediately after handling them. Squirrel will give your app a short amount of time (~15sec) to apply these operations and quit.

You should handle these events in your app's main entry point with something such as:

var app = require('app');

var handleStartupEvent = function() {
  if (process.platform !== 'win32') {
    return false;
  }

  var squirrelCommand = process.argv[1];
  switch (squirrelCommand) {
    case '--squirrel-install':
    case '--squirrel-updated':

      // Optionally do things such as:
      //
      // - Install desktop and start menu shortcuts
      // - Add your .exe to the PATH
      // - Write to the registry for things like file associations and
      //   explorer context menus

      // Always quit when done
      app.quit();

      return true;
    case '--squirrel-uninstall':
      // Undo anything you did in the --squirrel-install and
      // --squirrel-updated handlers

      // Always quit when done
      app.quit();

      return true;
    case '--squirrel-obsolete':
      // This is called on the outgoing version of your app before 
      // we update to the new version - it's the opposite of
      // --squirrel-updated
      app.quit();
      return true;
  }
};

if (handleStartupEvent()) {
  return;
}