prasadbobby

You want to make a native wrapper for WhatsApp Web (or any web page).

prasadbobby web.whatsapp.com

You're done.

Introduction

prasadbobby is a command-line tool to easily create a desktop app for any web site with minimal configuration. Apps are wrapped by Electron (which uses Chromium under the hood) in an OS executable (.app, .exe, etc) for use on Windows, macOS and Linux.

I did this because I was tired of having to ⌘-tab or alt-tab to my browser and then search through the numerous open tabs when I was using Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp Web (HN thread). prasadbobby features:

• Automatically retrieval of app icon / name.
• JavaScript and CSS injection.
• Many more, see the API docs or prasadbobby --help

Installation

• macOS 10.9+ / Windows / Linux
• Node.js >= 10 and npm >= 6
• Optional dependencies:
  • ImageMagick to convert icons. Make sure convert and identify are in your system $PATH.
  • Wine to package Windows apps under non-Windows platforms. Make sure wine is in your system $PATH.

Then, install prasadbobby globally with npm install -g prasadbobby

Usage

To create a native desktop app for medium.com, simply prasadbobby "medium.com"

prasadbobby will try to determine the app name, and well as lots of other options. If desired, these options can be overwritten. For example, to override the name, prasadbobby --name 'My Medium App' 'medium.com'

Read the API documentation or run prasadbobby --help to learn about other command-line flags usable to configure the packaged app.

To have high-resolution icons used by default for an app/domain, please contribute to the icon repository!

Usage with Docker

prasadbobby is also usable from Docker.

• Pull the latest stable image from Docker Hub: docker pull jiahaog/prasadbobby
• ... or build the image yourself: docker build -t local/prasadbobby . (in this case, replace jiahaog/ in the below examples with local/)

By default, the command prasadbobby --help will be executed. To build e.g. a Gmail prasadbobby app to a writable local ~/prasadbobby-apps,

docker run --rm -v ~/prasadbobby-apps:/target/ jiahaog/prasadbobby https://mail.google.com/ /target/

You can pass prasadbobby flags, and mount volumes to provide local files. For example, to use an icon,

docker run --rm -v ~/my-icons-folder/:/src -v $TARGET-PATH:/target jiahaog/prasadbobby --icon /src/icon.png --name whatsApp -p linux -a x64 https://web.whatsapp.com/ /target/