template-electron-installation

A bare-bones Electron setup for web-based media art & installations.

See the canvas-sketch branch for a modified version of this repo that is a little more iterative (hot reloading and so on).

Git clone this repo, then:

cd template-electron-installation

# install deps
npm install

Now you can do the following:

# Test the app with a local server, i.e. pure browser
npm run serve

# Test the app with Electron locally
npm run app

# Bundle the Electron app for 64-bit macOS + Windows
# It will install some dependencies on first run
npm run packager

# Once packaged, you can run this to zip it up
npm run zip

Kiosk + Hotkeys

The Electron app runs in kiosk fullscreen mode and comes setup with the following hotkeys:

• Quit: Cmd/Ctrl + W or Cmd/Ctrl + Q
• Reload: Cmd/Ctrl + R
• Toggle Kiosk/Fullscreen Mode: Cmd/Ctrl + F

Config

See ./src/config.js for a couple boot options.

Packaging Windows + Mac

If you are in control of the installation you might rather just run it locally with npm run app — but an EXE/APP executable is handy if you are passing the installation off to a remote team. You can change the output name with productName in ./package.json.

I run these commands from a macOS computer. You'll need wine installed via homebrew to generate Windows builds. Or, you can modify the package.json script to only generate a specific build target. See electron-packager for details.

Tips

If you have files or folders in your project repo that you don't want copied over, make sure to --ignore those in the electron-packager script.

You can also speed up build time by using --platform=win32,darwin --arch=ia32,x64 instead of --all, if you only want to build for EXE/APP.

Another thing is to move all of your client-side (HTML/JS) dependencies to devDependencies in package.json, and only include modules that you actually require in src/app.js (currently the template doesn't require any additional modules). This will lead to a smaller output size.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.