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title | description | slug | hide_title |
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Application Packaging | To distribute your app with Electron, you need to package and rebrand it. To do this, you can either use specialized tooling or manual approaches. | application-distribution | false |
To distribute your app with Electron, you need to package and rebrand it. To do this, you can either use specialized tooling or manual approaches.
With tooling
There are a couple tools out there that exist to package and distribute your Electron app. We recommend using Electron Forge. You can check out its documentation directly, or refer to the Packaging and Distribution part of the Electron tutorial.
Manual packaging
If you prefer the manual approach, there are 2 ways to distribute your application:
- With prebuilt binaries
- With an app source code archive
With prebuilt binaries
To distribute your app manually, you need to download Electron's
prebuilt binaries. Next, the folder
containing your app should be named app
and placed in Electron's resources
directory as shown in the following examples.
:::note
The location of Electron's prebuilt binaries is indicated
with electron/
in the examples below.
:::
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
electron/resources/app
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
Then execute Electron.app
on macOS, electron
on Linux, or electron.exe
on Windows, and Electron will start as your app. The electron
directory
will then be your distribution to deliver to users.
With an app source code archive (asar)
Instead of shipping your app by copying all of its source files, you can package your app into an asar archive to improve the performance of reading files on platforms like Windows, if you are not already using a bundler such as Parcel or Webpack.
To use an asar
archive to replace the app
folder, you need to rename the
archive to app.asar
, and put it under Electron's resources directory like
below, and Electron will then try to read the archive and start from it.
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar
electron/resources/
└── app.asar
You can find more details on how to use asar
in the
electron/asar
repository.
Rebranding with downloaded binaries
After bundling your app into Electron, you will want to rebrand Electron before distributing it to users.
-
Windows: You can rename
electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other information with tools like rcedit. -
Linux: You can rename the
electron
executable to any name you like. -
macOS: You can rename
Electron.app
to any name you want, and you also have to rename theCFBundleDisplayName
,CFBundleIdentifier
andCFBundleName
fields in the following files:Electron.app/Contents/Info.plist
Electron.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist
You can also rename the helper app to avoid showing
Electron Helper
in the Activity Monitor, but make sure you have renamed the helper app's executable file's name.The structure of a renamed app would be like:
MyApp.app/Contents
├── Info.plist
├── MacOS/
│ └── MyApp
└── Frameworks/
└── MyApp Helper.app
├── Info.plist
└── MacOS/
└── MyApp Helper
:::note
it is also possible to rebrand Electron by changing the product name and
building it from source. To do this you need to set the build argument
corresponding to the product name (electron_product_name = "YourProductName"
)
in the args.gn
file and rebuild.
Keep in mind this is not recommended as setting up the environment to compile from source is not trivial and takes significant time.
:::