Edon is a graphical interface for starting and managing Node.js servers in a similar way that MAMP or Xampp is for PHP.
A build for Windows can be downloaded here.
- David Messerer
- Sarah Schütz
Edon will help you to be more productive when working with multiple node driven servers and multiple applications.
Projects can be created or selected using the "Select Project" dropdown. For each project a project root directory needs to be specified. Then multiple servers can be configured for each project. As soon as the wanted command is entered, the wanted task can be started. Typical commands are npm start, webpack --watch, gulp dev etc. To be sure that the wanted task will run correctly the command needs to be installed globally on the computer and the configuration file for the specified task must be found in the given root directory.
The second icon in the menu bar on the left is to start a static fileserver for simple static websites or random test cases. All you need to do is select a root directory with an index.html file and you are good to go.
The project is set up using Electron, React and Redux. Also an Express.js server is included to provide a static Webserver.
The Node version used for development is 7.2.0. The Version of electron is 1.7.0 and the NODE version used by electron is 7.9.0.
Yarn is used to load dependencies. All used versions are stored in yarn.lock.
The configuration files like the .gitignore, package.json and webpack.config.js files are in the project root directory as well as all installed node modules. Furthermore the project root directory contains the folders app, build, dist, public and server.
The app directory contains all relevent source code for the app like all React components the js files for Redux and the main.js file for the Electron main process. The entry point for React is the index.js file.
The build and the dist directory are for building the app. The dist directory is in the .gitignore and is only present when the app is built.
The public directory contains all static files like images and the index.html file. Also the static style.css and the bundled javascript can be found in this directory.
The server directory contains only the configuration of the express server which is only used by the app to start a static web server in a given directory. The app itself doesn't use any webserver because it is not needed. The routing is done via the React HashRouter.
After the first download of the source code npm install or yarn must be run in the project root directory.
All necessary scripts to run the project can be found in the package.json file. The electron app is started using npm start. To build the react part of the application a webpack server is used. The webpack server should be started using npm run watch. When running the project for the first time webpack needs to run before the app can be started, because the bundle.js file needs to be created. The development tools are not shown but can be uncommented in the main.js file.
When using dev tools it is important not to reload the project while any background process is running. If done so, the process will not be stopped and the application will still think the the server is running, but trying to stop the process/server will result in an error because the reference to the process is gone. This however is not a problem in production because the window cannot be reloaded.
To sum it up, you can run the project as follows:
npm installoryarnnpm run watch- when webpack is started and
bundle.jsfile is creatednpm start
The configuration of the projects and server is stored in json files using the electron-store module in the specified default directory of the bundle (see). The 2 files generated are project-store.json and server-store.json. The processes are not stored because they will be stoped anyway if the application is closed.
Some tests can be found in the app/test folder. The tests can be run using npm run test.
To build the app electron-builder module is used. A build can be created by running npm run dist like specified in the package.json file. Before building the link where the node server is started from has to be changed to node resources/app/server/server.js in the file app/store/states/server.js. Otherwise the static file server will not work in the build. The build can then be found in the dist folder of the project. A build for Windows can be downloaded here.
The application has been tested on Windows and Mac OSX. Proper functionality on Linux is likely but cannot be guaranteed.