Deprecated

Please use the official way of requiring Electron: https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/first-app

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@vscode/gulp-electron

Installation

npm install --save-dev @vscode/gulp-electron

Usage

You can use this module in two distinct ways: to package your application and/or to download a version of Electron to disk.

How to Package Your Application

You should source your app's files using gulp.src and pipe them through @vscode/gulp-electron. The following task will create your application in the app folder, ready for launch.

var gulp = require("gulp");
var symdest = require("gulp-symdest");
var electron = require("@vscode/gulp-electron");

gulp.task("default", function () {
  return gulp
    .src("src/**")
    .pipe(electron({ version: "0.34.1", platform: "darwin" }))
    .pipe(symdest("app"));
});

Note: It is important to use gulp-symdest only because of the OS X platform. An application bundle has symlinks within and if you use gulp.dest to pipe the built app to disk, those will be missing. symdest will make sure symlinks are taken into account.

Finally, you can always pipe it to a zip archive for easy distribution. joaomoreno/gulp-vinyl-zip is recommended:

var gulp = require("gulp");
var zip = require("gulp-vinyl-zip");
var electron = require("@vscode/gulp-electron");

gulp.task("default", function () {
  return gulp
    .src("src/**")
    .pipe(electron({ version: "0.34.1", platform: "darwin" }))
    .pipe(zip.dest("app-darwin.zip"));
});

How to Download Electron

There's also a very handy export electron.dest() function that makes sure you always have the exact version of Electron in a directory:

var gulp = require("gulp");
var electron = require("@vscode/gulp-electron");

gulp.task("default", function () {
  return electron.dest("electron-build", {
    version: "0.34.1",
    platform: "darwin",
  });
});

This will place a vanilla Electron build into the electron-build directory. If you run it consecutively and it detects that the version in the destination directory is the intended one, it will end up in a no-op. Else it will download the provided version and replace it.

Options

You must provide the following options:

• version - the Electron version to use
• platform - kind of OS (darwin, linux, win32)

The following options are optional:

• quiet - suppress a progress bar when downloading

• token - GitHub access token(to avoid request limit. You can grab it here)

• arch - the processor architecture (ia32, x64)

• Windows

  • winIcon - path to an .ico file
  • companyName - company name
  • copyright - copyright statement

• Darwin

  • darwinIcon - path to an .icns file
  • darwinHelpBookFolder - the CFBundleHelpBookFolder value
  • darwinHelpBookName - the CFBundleHelpBookName value
  • darwinBundleDocumentTypes - (reference) array of dictionaries, each containing the following structure:
    • name - the CFBundleTypeName value
    • role - the CFBundleTypeRole value
    • ostypes - the CFBundleTypeOSTypes value, a string array
    • utis - the LSItemContentTypes value, a string array
    • extensions - the CFBundleTypeExtensions value, a string array of file extensions
    • iconFile - the CFBundleTypeIconFile value
  • darwinForceDarkModeSupport - Forces Mojave dark mode support to be enabled for older Electron versions

• Linux

  • linuxExecutableName - overwrite the name of the executable in Linux