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@electron/packager

Package your Electron app into OS-specific bundles (.app, .exe, etc.) via JavaScript or the command line.

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Supported Platforms | Installation | Usage | API | Contributing | Support | Related Apps/Libraries | FAQ | Release Notes

About

Electron Packager is a command line tool and Node.js library that bundles Electron-based application source code with a renamed Electron executable and supporting files into folders ready for distribution.

For creating distributables like installers and Linux packages, consider using either Electron Forge (which uses Electron Packager internally), or one of the related Electron tools, which utilizes Electron Packager-created folders as a basis.

Note that packaged Electron applications can be relatively large. A zipped, minimal Electron application is approximately the same size as the zipped prebuilt binary for a given target platform, target arch, and Electron version (files named electron-v${version}-${platform}-${arch}.zip).

Supported Platforms

Electron Packager is known to run on the following host platforms:

It generates executables/bundles for the following target platforms:

<sup>*</sup> Note for macOS / Mac App Store target bundles: the .app bundle can only be signed when building on a host macOS platform.

Installation

This module requires Node.js 16.13.0 or higher to run.

npm install --save-dev @electron/packager

It is not recommended to install @electron/packager globally.

Usage

Via JavaScript

JavaScript API usage can be found in the API documentation.

From the command line

Running Electron Packager from the command line has this basic form:

npx @electron/packager <sourcedir> <appname> --platform=<platform> --arch=<arch> [optional flags...]

Note: npx can be substituted for yarn or npm exec depending on what package manager and the version you have installed.

This will:

--platform and --arch can be omitted, in two cases:

For an overview of the other optional flags, run electron-packager --help or see usage.txt. For detailed descriptions, see the API documentation.

For flags that are structured as objects, you can pass each option as via dot notation as such:

npx @electron/packager --flag.foo="bar"
# will pass in { flag: { foo: "bar"} } as an option to the Electron Packager API

If appname is omitted, this will use the name specified by "productName" or "name" in the nearest package.json.

Characters in the Electron app name which are not allowed in all target platforms' filenames (e.g., /), will be replaced by hyphens (-).

You should be able to launch the app on the platform you built for. If not, check your settings and try again.

Be careful not to include node_modules you don't want into your final app. If you put them in the devDependencies section of package.json, by default none of the modules related to those dependencies will be copied in the app bundles. (This behavior can be turned off with the prune: false API option or --no-prune CLI flag.) In addition, folders like .git and node_modules/.bin will be ignored by default. You can use --ignore to ignore files and folders via a regular expression (not a glob pattern). Examples include --ignore=\.gitignore or --ignore="\.git(ignore|modules)".

Example

Let's assume that you have made an app based on the electron-quick-start repository on a macOS host platform with the following file structure:

foobar
├── package.json
├── index.html
├── […other files, like the app's LICENSE…]
└── script.js

…and that the following is true:

When one runs the following command for the first time in the foobar directory:

npx @electron/packager .

@electron/packager will do the following:

The file structure now looks like:

foobar
├── Foo Bar-darwin-x64
│   ├── Foo Bar.app
│   │   └── […Mac app contents…]
│   ├── LICENSE [the Electron license]
│   └── version
├── […other application bundles, like "Foo Bar-win32-x64" (sans quotes)…]
├── package.json
├── index.html
├── […other files, like the app's LICENSE…]
└── script.js

The Foo Bar.app folder generated can be executed by a system running macOS, which will start the packaged Electron app. This is also true of the Windows x64 build on a system running a new enough version of Windows for a 64-bit system (via Foo Bar-win32-x64/Foo Bar.exe), and so on.

Related

Distributable Creators

Windows:

macOS:

Linux:

Plugins

These Node modules utilize Electron Packager API hooks: