is-electron-renderer

is-electron-renderer

Check if code is running in Electron renderer process.

Why?

Electron code can run in either the main process or the renderer process. This is the same as asking if the code is running in a web page with access to the DOM or not. Read more here: https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/quick-start.md

Use Cases:

• Creating a single module that acts differently whether it's running in main or renderer.
• Logging utility. One process (main) would be responsible for writing to log files, while renderers would send log data to the main. Would allow your code to have one log method.
• Testing. Your test code may behave differently if the DOM is available.
• Normalize console.log behavior. console.log behavior is weird in renderer, this can easily be fixed.

Why Use a One Line Module?

Excellent discussion here: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/10. If that doesn't convince you, then maybe the fact that Electron could change the way that they inherit global in renderer and if they do, you would have to change your code whereas if you used this module, you'd just have to update to the latest version =)

Install

npm i --save is-electron-renderer

Usage

You'll notice that when using console.log in Electron that in the renderer process outputs some weird log level garbage to stderr before your actual console message. You can normalize this behavior:

console-hook.js:

// clean up Electron output
function hook () {
  var isRenderer = require('is-electron-renderer')
  var pre = '(' + (isRenderer ? 'RENDERER' : 'MAIN') + ') '
  console.log = function (msg) {
    process.stdout.write(pre + msg + '\n')
  }
}

module.exports = {
  hook: hook
}

index.js:

require('./console-hook').hook()
console.log('hello')

output (main):

(MAIN) hello

output (renderer):

(RENDERER) hello

API

var isRenderer = require('is-electron-renderer')
console.log(isRenderer)
// => (BOOLEAN)

License

MIT

Copyright 2015 JP Richardson