electron-angular-toolkit

Important!!!!

If you are upgrading from 0.0.3 please reinstall angular-cli first

electron-angular-toolkit

About

This package provides a command line tool, which is supposed to make the development of electron applications with angular2 as simple as possible.

This package was tested with angular-cli@1.0.0-beta.22-1

Usage

Create the app

Create a new project with the angular-cli and navigate to the created folder:

ng new myapp
cd myapp

Install angular-electron-toolkit

npm install electron-angular-toolkit --save-dev

Run the prepare command, this will install some packages, modify the fieles: package.json, angular-cli.json, src/index.html and it will create an entry point(src/electron-main.js)

node_modules/.bin/electron-angular-toolkit prepare

Using the node/electron api

Using the node/electron api is quite easy, simply import the package you want to use, the electron-angular-toolkit provides a webpack-config which prevents webpack from trying to bundle those native modules

import * as os from 'os';
import * as electron from 'electron';
import { Component } from '@angular/core';
@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent {
  title = `app works on ${os.platform()} with electron ${electron.remote.process.versions.electron}!`;
}

Run the application

The command

node_modules/.bin/electron-angular-toolkit build

will use the ng build command to bundle the application with webpack. A new bundle will be created each time you'll change your sourcecode. Now you can use

electron .

to launch the application. Using the build command with the -w option, will create a new build each time your sourcecode changes.

Publish the application

The command

node_modules/.bin/electron-angular-toolkit publish

will create a dist folder inside your project, which will contain the stand-alone-application and a setup file. Before publishing it is required to set the following fields in your package.json:

• description
• author
• appId (is not required but should be used otherwise it will be "com.electron.{appname}") To get a build for a specific platform user -w (Windows), -l (Linux), -m (Mac)

Native modules

Some modules have to run in the node js process, to prevent them from getting bundled into the webpack bundle you can add them to your package.json:

{
 ...,
 "nativeModules": [
    "decompress"
  ],
  ....
}