electron-packager

Package your Electron app into OS-specific bundles (.app, .exe, etc.) via JavaScript or the command line.

About

Electron Packager is a command line tool that packages electron app source code into executables like .app or .exe along with a copy of Electron.

This module was developed as part of Dat, a grant funded non-profit open source project. It is maintained by volunteers. If you are benefitting from this module please consider making contributions back.

Note that packaged Electron applications can be relatively large. A zipped barebones OS X Electron application is around 40MB.

Supported Platforms

Electron Packager is known to run on the following host platforms:

• Windows (32/64 bit)
• OS X
• Linux (x86/x86_64)

It generates executables/bundles for the following target platforms:

• Windows (also known as win32, for both 32/64 bit)
• OS X (also known as darwin) / Mac App Store (also known as mas)*
• Linux (for both x86/x86_64)

* Note for OS X / MAS target bundles: the .app bundle can only be signed when building on a host OS X platform.

Installation

# for use in npm scripts
npm install electron-packager --save-dev

# for use from cli
npm install electron-packager -g

Usage

From the Command Line

Running electron-packager from the command line has this basic form:

electron-packager <sourcedir> <appname> --platform=<platform> --arch=<arch> --version=<Electron version> [optional flags...]

This will:

• Find or download the correct release of Electron
• Use that version of Electron to create a app in <out>/<appname>-<platform>-<arch> (this can be customized via an optional flag)

For details on the optional flags, run electron-packager --help or see usage.txt.

If appname is omitted, this will use the name specified by "productName" or "name" in the nearest package.json. If version is omitted, it will use the version of the nearest installed electron-prebuilt dependency.

You should be able to launch the app on the platform you built for. If not, check your settings and try again.

Be careful not to include node_modules you don't want into your final app. electron-packager, electron-prebuilt and .git will be ignored by default. You can use --ignore to ignore files and folders via a regular expression. For example, --ignore=node_modules/electron-packager or --ignore="node_modules/(electron-packager|electron-prebuilt)".

Example

Given the app FooBar with the following file structure:

foobar
├─package.json
└┬src
 ├─index.html
 ├─script.js
 └─style.css

When one runs the following command for the first time in the foobar directory:

electron-packager . FooBar --platform=darwin --arch=x64 --version=0.35.6

electron-packager will do the following:

• download Electron 0.35.6 for OS X on x64 (and cache the download in ~/.electron)
• build the OS X FooBar.app
• place FooBar.app in foobar/FooBar-darwin-x64/ (since an out directory was not specified)

The file structure now looks like:

foobar
├┬FooBar-darwin-x64
│├┬FooBar.app
││└[…Mac app contents…]
│├─LICENSE
│└─version
├─package.json
└┬src
 ├─index.html
 ├─script.js
 └─style.css

The FooBar.app folder generated can be executed by a system running OS X, which will start the packaged Electron app.

Programmatic API

var packager = require('electron-packager')
packager(opts, function done (err, appPath) { })

packager(opts, callback)

opts

Required

arch - String

Allowed values: ia32, x64, all

The target system architecture(s) to build for. Not required if the all option is set. If arch is set to all, all supported architectures for the target platforms specified by platform will be built. Arbitrary combinations of individual architectures are also supported via a comma-delimited string or array of strings. The non-all values correspond to the architecture names used by Electron releases.

dir - String

The source directory.

platform - String

Allowed values: linux, win32, darwin, mas, all

The target platform(s) to build for. Not required if the all option is set. If platform is set to all, all supported target platforms for the target architectures specified by arch will be built. Arbitrary combinations of individual platforms are also supported via a comma-delimited string or array of strings. The non-all values correspond to the platform names used by Electron releases.

Optional

all - Boolean

When true, sets both arch and platform to all.

app-bundle-id - String

The bundle identifier to use in the application's plist (OS X only).

app-category-type - String

The application category type, as shown in the Finder via View -> Arrange by Application Category when viewing the Applications directory (OS X only).

For example, app-category-type=public.app-category.developer-tools will set the application category to Developer Tools.

Valid values are listed in Apple's documentation.

app-copyright - String

The human-readable copyright line to use in the app plist, will be displayed in the application About box (OS X only).

app-version - String

The release version of the application. Maps to the ProductVersion metadata property on Windows, and CFBundleShortVersionString on OS X.

asar - Boolean

Whether to package the application's source code into an archive, using Electron's archive format. Reasons why you may want to enable this feature are described in an application packaging tutorial in Electron's documentation.

Defaults to false.

asar-unpack - String

A glob expression, when specified, unpacks the file with matching names to the app.asar.unpacked directory.

asar-unpack-dir - String

Unpacks the dir to app.asar.unpacked directory whose names exactly match this string. The asar-unpack-dir is relative to dir. For example, asar-unpack-dir=sub_dir will unpack the directory /<dir>/sub_dir.

build-version - String

The build version of the application. Maps to the FileVersion metadata property on Windows, and CFBundleVersion on OS X.

cache - String

The directory where prebuilt, pre-packaged Electron downloads are cached. Defaults to $HOME/.electron.

helper-bundle-id - String

The bundle identifier to use in the application helper's plist (OS X only).

icon - String

Currently you must look for conversion tools in order to supply an icon in the format required by the platform:

• OS X: .icns
• Windows: .ico (See below for details on non-Windows platforms)
• Linux: this option is not required, as the dock/window list icon is set via the icon option in the BrowserWindow constructor. Setting the icon in the file manager is not currently supported.

If the file extension is omitted, it is auto-completed to the correct extension based on the platform, including when --platform=all is in effect.

ignore - RegExp or Function

A pattern which specifies which files to ignore when copying files to create the package(s). Alternatively, this can be a predicate function that, given the file path, returns true if the file should be ignored or false if the file should be kept.

name - String The application name. If omitted, it will use the "productName" or "name" of the nearest package.json.

out - String

The base directory where the finished package(s) are created. Defaults to the current working directory.

overwrite - Boolean

Whether to replace an already existing output directory for a given platform (true) or skip recreating it (false). Defaults to false.

prune - Boolean

Runs npm prune --production before starting to package the app.

sign - String

The identity used when signing the package via codesign. (Only for the OS X / Mac App Store target platforms, when XCode is present on the host platform.)

sign-entitlements - String

The path to entitlements used in signing. (Currently limited to Mac App Store distribution.)

strict-ssl - Boolean

Whether SSL certificates are required to be valid when downloading Electron. Defaults to true.

tmpdir - String

The base directory to use as a temp directory. Defaults to the system temp directory.

version - String

The Electron version with which the app is built (without the leading 'v') - for example, 0.33.9. See Electron releases for valid versions. If omitted, it will use the version of the nearest local installation of electron-prebuilt.

version-string - Object

Object hash of application metadata to embed into the executable (Windows only):

• CompanyName
• LegalCopyright
• FileDescription
• OriginalFilename
• FileVersion (deprecated and will be removed in a future major version, please use the top-level build-version parameter instead)
• ProductVersion (deprecated and will be removed in a future major version, please use the top-level app-version parameter instead)
• ProductName
• InternalName

callback

err - Error

Contains errors, if any.

appPath - String

Path to the newly created application.

Building Windows apps from non-Windows platforms

Building an Electron app for the Windows platform with a custom icon requires editing the Electron.exe file. Currently, electron-packager uses node-rcedit to accomplish this. A Windows executable is bundled in that node package and needs to be run in order for this functionality to work, so on non-Windows host platforms, Wine needs to be installed. On OS X, it is installable via Homebrew.

Related

• electron-builder - for creating installer wizards
• grunt-electron - grunt plugin for electron-packager
• electron-packager-interactive - an interactive CLI for electron-packager