electron-prebuilt

Install electron prebuilt binaries for command-line use using npm. This module helps you easily install the electron command for use on the command line without having to compile anything.

Electron is a JavaScript runtime that bundles Node.js and Chromium. You use it similar to the node command on the command line for executing JavaScript programs. For more info you can read this intro blog post or dive into the Electron documentation

Installation

Download and install the latest build of electron for your OS and add it to your projects package.json as a devDependency:

npm install electron-prebuilt --save-dev

This is the preferred way to use electron, as it doesn't require users to install electron globally.

You can also use the -g flag (global) to symlink it into your PATH:

npm install -g electron-prebuilt

If that command fails with an EACCESS error you may have to run it again with sudo:

sudo npm install -g electron-prebuilt

Now you can just run electron to run electron:

electron

If you need to use an HTTP proxy you can set these environment variables

If you want to change the architecture that is downloaded (e.g., ia32 on an x64 machine), you can use the --arch flag with npm install or set the npm_config_arch environment variable:

npm install --arch=ia32 electron-prebuilt

About

Works on Mac, Windows and Linux OSes that Electron supports (e.g. Electron does not support Windows XP).

The version numbers of this module match the version number of the offical Electron releases, which do not follow semantic versioning.

This module is automatically released whenever a new version of Electron is released thanks to electron-prebuilt-updater written by John Muhl.

Usage

First you have to write an electron application

Then you can run your app using:

electron your-app/

Related modules

• electron-packager - package and distribute your electron app in OS executables (.app, .exe etc)
• electron-builder - create installers for Windows and OS X. It's built to work together with electron-packager
• menubar - high level way to create menubar desktop applications with electron

Find more at the awesome-electron list

Programmatic usage

Most people use this from the command line, but if you require electron-prebuilt inside your node app it will return the file path to the binary. Use this to spawn electron from node scripts.

var electron = require('electron-prebuilt')
var proc = require('child_process')

// will something similar to print /Users/maf/.../Electron
console.log(electron)

// spawn electron
var child = proc.spawn(electron)