electron-nucleus

electron-nucleus

Analytics, licensing and bug reports for Electron using Nucleus.

We tried to make it as simple as possible to report the data you need to analyze your app and improve it.

To start using this module, sign up and get an app ID on the Nucleus website.

This module is mainly working on the renderer process. It should still be initiated in the main process for catching all errors (or reporting events inside it). However, if you only have access to the main process you can still use Nucleus as explained below.

Installation

Using npm:

$ npm install electron-nucleus --save

Usage

Add the following code to import Nucleus in the renderer process:

const Nucleus = require("electron-nucleus")("<Your App Id>")

Also add it to the main process if you need to report events from there.

If you are only able to use Nucleus in the main process, you should set the onlyMainProcess option:

const Nucleus = require("electron-nucleus")("<Your App Id>", { onlyMainProcess: true })

Sign up and get a tracking ID for your app here.

Options

You can init Nucleus with options:

const Nucleus = require("electron-nucleus")("<Your App Id>", {
	disableInDev: false, // disable module while in development (default: false)
	disableTracking: false, // completely disable tracking
	onlyMainProcess: false, // if you can only use Nucleus in the mainprocess
	disableErrorReports: false, // disable errors reporting (default: false)
	autoUserId: false, // auto gives the user an id: username@hostname
	userId: '[e-mail]', // set an identifier for this user
	persist: false, // cache events to disk if offline to report later
	version: '1.3.9', // set a custom version for your app (default: autodetected)
	language: 'es' // specify a custom language (default: autodetected)
})

By default version, language and country are autodetected but you can overwrite them.

Where options is an object, each property is optional. You can start using the module with just the app ID.

Note : when running in development, the app version will be '0.0.0'

Track custom data

You can report custom data along with the automatic data.

Those will be visible in your user dashboard if you previously set an user ID.

The module will remember past properties so you can use Nucleus.setProps multiple times without overwriting past props.

Properties can either numbers, strings or booleans. Nested properties or arrays aren't supported at the moment.

Nucleus.setProps({
	age: 34,
	name: 'Richard Hendricks',
	jobType: 'CEO'
})

Enable overwrite: set the second parameter as true to overwrite past properties.

Nucleus.setProps({
	age: 23
}, true)

Events

After initializing Nucleus, you can send your own custom events.

Nucleus.track("PLAYED_TRACK")

They are a couple events that are reserved by Nucleus: init, error: and nucleus:. You shouldn't report events containing these strings.

Tracking with data

You can also add extra information to tracked events, as a JSON object.

Properties can either numbers, strings or booleans. Nested properties or arrays aren't supported at the moment.

Example

Nucleus.track("PLAYED_TRACK", {
	trackName: 'My Awesome Song',
	duration: 120
})

Toggle tracking

This will completely disable any communication with Nucleus' servers.

To opt-out your users from tracking, use the following methods:

Nucleus.disableTracking()

and to opt back in:

Nucleus.enableTracking()

This change won't persist after restarts so you have to handle the saving of the settings.

You can also supply a disableTracking: true option to the module on start if you want to directly prevent tracking.

Identify your users

You can track specific users actions on the 'User Explorer' section of your dashboard.

For that, you can supply an userId when initing the Nucleus module.

It can be your own generated ID, an email, username... etc.

const Nucleus = require("electron-nucleus")("<Your App Id>", {
	userId: 'someUniqueUserId'
})

Or if you don't know it on start, you can add it later with:

Nucleus.setUserId('someUniqueUserId')

Alternatively, set the autoUserId option of the module to true to automatically assign the user an ID based on his username and hostname.

Errors

Nucleus will by default report all uncaughtException and unhandledRejection.

If you'd like to act on these errors, for example show them to your user, quit the app or reload it, you can define an onError function, which will be called on errors happening on the respective process.

Nucleus.onError = (type, err) => {
	console.error(err)
	// type will either be uncaughtException, unhandledRejection or windowError
}

windowError is an uncaughtException that happened in the renderer process. It was catched with window.onerror.

If you'd like to report another type of error, you can do so with:

Nucleus.trackError('myCustomError', err)

Updates

If the user is running a version inferior to the one set in your app settings (account section in the dashboard), it can call a function so you can alert the user (or something else).

If there's an update, the function will be called when starting the app.

Nucleus.onUpdate = (lastVersion) => {
	alert('New version available: ' + lastVersion)
}

Note : when running in development, the app version will be '0.0.0', so you can test this by setting a higher version in your dashboard

License checking (legacy)

You can check if a license (created via Nucleus's API) is valid with the following code:

Nucleus.checkLicense('SOME_LICENSE', (err, license) => {
	if (err) return console.error(err)

	if (license.valid) {
		console.log('License is valid :) Using policy '+license.policy)
	} else {
		console.log('License is invalid :(')
	}
})

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