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electron-require

Simplified require in electron applications

electron-require is a super basic, no dependency convenience wrapper around require for your electron applications. You can use it to avoid using complex require paths in your application.

Installation

$ npm install --save electron-require

Then include it in your code:

const rq = require('electron-require');

Usage

`rq()`

rq('./module.js') imports module.js from the current process directory (it is actually an alias to require.main.require('./module.js')).

`rq.electron()`

rq.electron('module') is the same than require('electron')['module'], except that it resolves into require('electron').remote['module'] when module is not found, if used in the renderer process.

`rq.remote()`

rq.remote('module') is the same than require('electron').remote.require('module'), except that it resolves into rq.main('module') when used in the main process.

Aliases

You can add your own custom alias with rq.set(key, path).

Once rq.set('myAlias', 'my/path') is called, rq.myAlias('./module.js') will try to load my/path/module.js.

Example 1:

rq.set('local', 'local');

// Import [application root]/local/my-local-module.js into myLocalModule
const myLocalModule = rq.local('./my-local-module.js');

Example 2:

let userData = electron.app.getPath('userData');
rq.set('plugin', userData + '/plugins');

// Import [userdata]/plugins/my-plugin.js into myPlugin
const myPlugin = rq.plugin('/my-plugin.js');

Template strings

You can use template string in the path passed to .set():

%{app} resolves to app.getAppPath()
%{anyOtherName} resolves to app.getPath('anyOtherName')

So we can write example 2 in a simpler way:

rq.set('plugin', '%{userData}/plugins');

// Import [userdata]/plugins/my-plugin.js into myPlugin
const myPlugin = rq.plugin('/my-plugin.js');

Read more about this in the app module documentation

Multiple alias

rq.set can also be used with an object:

rq.set({
	'local': 'local',
    'plugin': '%{userData}/plugins'
});

Custom aliases defined in package.json

In most cases you will want to use the same custom aliases for the whole project. You can define custom aliases by adding an electron-require key to your app package.json file:

"electron-require": {
    "first": "path/to/first/alias",
	"second": "path/to/second/alias"
}

Default aliases

Default aliases are the following:

{
    "root": "",
    "renderer": "app/renderer",
    "main": "app/main",
    "browser": "app/main"
}

It actually assumes that your app is organized in the following way:

.
├── app
│   ├── main
│   │   └── [main process modules]
│   └── renderer
│       └── [renderer process modules]
└── package.json

But you can of course override theses default values by using rq.set() or by adding an electron-require entry in your package.json.