JavaScript Everywhere

Chapter 20. Electron Deployment

The first time I taught a programming course, I came up with the clever idea of introducing the course topics through a text adventure game. Students would come into the lab, sit down at a desk, and walk through a series of hilarious (to me) prompts and instructions. This was met with mixed reactions, not because of the jokes (well, maybe because of the jokes), but because students had not interacted with a “program” in this way. The students were accustomed to a GUI (graphic user interface), and interacting with a program through text prompts felt wrong to many of them.

Presently, to run our application we need to type a prompt in our terminal application to start the Electron process. In this chapter, we’ll look at how we can bundle our application for distribution. To achieve this, we’ll be using the popular Electron Builder library, which will help us package and distribute our application to our users.

Electron Builder

Electron Builder is a library designed to simplify the packaging and distribution of Electron and Proton Native applications. While there are other packaging solutions, Electron Builder simplifies a number of pain points associated with application distribution, including:

• Code signing

• Multiplatform distribution targets

• Autoupdates

• Distribution

It offers a great balance between flexibility and features. Additionally, though we won’t be making use of them, there are several Electron Builder boilerplates for Webpack ...