mk-electron-compile
v3.1.3
Published
Electron supporting package to compile JS and CSS in Electron applications
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electron-compile
electron-compile compiles JS and CSS on the fly with a single call in your app's 'ready' function.
For JavaScript:
- JavaScript ES6/ES7 (via Babel)
- TypeScript
- CoffeeScript
For CSS:
- Less
For HTML:
- Jade
For JSON:
- CSON
How does it work? (Easiest Way)
Change your reference to electron-prebuilt
to electron-prebuilt-compile
. Tada! You did it.
Wait, seriously?
Yeah. electron-prebuilt-compile
is like an electron-prebuilt
that Just Works with all of these languages above.
How does it work? (Slightly Harder Way)
First, add electron-compile
and electron-compilers
as a devDependency
.
npm install --save electron-compile
npm install --save-dev electron-compilers
Create a new file that will be the entry point of your app (perhaps changing 'main' in package.json) - you need to pass in the root directory of your application, which will vary based on your setup. The root directory is the directory that your package.json
is in.
// Assuming this file is ./src/es6-init.js
var appRoot = path.join(__dirname, '..');
// ...and that your main app is called ./src/main.js. This is written as if
// you were going to `require` the file from here.
require('electron-compile').init(appRoot, './main');
I did it, now what?
From then on, you can now simply include files directly in your HTML, no need for cross-compilation:
<head>
<script src="main.coffee"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="main.less" />
</head>
or just require them in:
require('./mylib') // mylib.ts
Something isn't working / I'm getting weird errors
electron-compile uses the debug module, set the DEBUG environment variable to debug what electron-compile is doing:
## Debug just electron-compile
DEBUG=electron-compile:* npm start
## Grab everything except for Babel which is very noisy
DEBUG=*,-babel npm start
How do I set up (Babel / Less / whatever) the way I want?
If you've got a .babelrc
and that's all you want to customize, you can simply use it directly. electron-compile will respect it, even the environment-specific settings. If you want to customize other compilers, use a .compilerc
file. Here's an example:
{
"application/javascript": {
"presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
"sourceMaps": "inline"
},
"text/less": {
"dumpLineNumbers": "comments"
}
}
.compilerc
also accepts environments with the same syntax as .babelrc
:
{
"env": {
"development": {
"application/javascript": {
"presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
"sourceMaps": "inline"
},
"text/less": {
"dumpLineNumbers": "comments"
}
},
"production": {
"application/javascript": {
"presets": ["stage-0", "es2015", "react"],
"sourceMaps": "none"
}
}
}
}
The opening Object is a list of MIME Types, and options passed to the compiler implementation. These parameters are documented here:
- Babel - http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/options
- CoffeeScript - http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/coffee-script.html#section-5
- TypeScript - https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/v1.5.0-beta/bin/typescriptServices.d.ts#L1076
- Less - http://lesscss.org/usage/index.html#command-line-usage-options
- Jade - http://jade-lang.com/api
How can I precompile my code for release-time?
electron-compile comes with a wrapper around the electron-packager project, electron-packager-compile
(if you use the electron-prebuilt-compile
project, this will just be electron-packager
). Run it the same way you run electron-packager
and the compilation wire-up will be done in the background.
How can I precompile my code for release-time? (the hard way)
electron-compile comes with a command-line application to pre-create a cache for you.
Usage: electron-compile --appdir [root-app-dir] paths...
Options:
-a, --appdir The top-level application directory (i.e. where your
package.json is)
-v, --verbose Print verbose information
-h, --help Show help
Run electron-compile
on all of your application assets, even if they aren't strictly code (i.e. your static assets like PNGs). electron-compile will recursively walk the given directories.
electron-compile --appDir /path/to/my/app ./src ./static
But I use Grunt / Gulp / I want to do Something Interesting
Compilation also has its own API, check out the documentation for more information.