Live editing development on desktop app

Electron application boilerplate based on React, Redux, React Router, Webpack, React Transform HMR for rapid application development

First, clone the repo via git:

git clone https://github.com/chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate.git your-project-name

And then install dependencies.

$ cd your-project-name && npm install

Run this two commands simultaneously in different console tabs.

$ npm run hot-server
$ npm run start-hot

or run two servers with one command

$ npm run dev

Note: requires a node version >= 4 and an npm version >= 2.

• OS X: Cmd Alt I or F12
• Linux: Ctrl Shift I or F12
• Windows: Ctrl Shift I or F12

See electron-debug for more information.

• All platforms: Ctrl H

See redux-devtools-dock-monitor for more information.

Now you can implement it using remote-redux-devtools with a remote monitor by yourself.

If you use any 3rd party libraries which can't be built with webpack, you must list them in your webpack.config.base.js：

externals: [
  // put your node 3rd party libraries which can't be built with webpack here (mysql, mongodb, and so on..)
]

You can find those lines in the file.

This boilerplate out of the box is configured to use css-modules.

All .css file extensions will use css-modules unless it has .global.css.

If you need global styles, stylesheets with .global.css will not go through the css-modules loader. e.g. app.global.css

$ npm run package

To package apps for all platforms:

$ npm run package-all

• --name, -n: Application name (default: ElectronReact)
• --version, -v: Electron version (default: latest version)
• --asar, -a: asar support (default: false)
• --icon, -i: Application icon
• --all: pack for all platforms

Use electron-packager to pack your app with --all options for darwin (osx), linux and win32 (windows) platform. After build, you will find them in release folder. Otherwise, you will only find one for your os.

test, tools, release folder and devDependencies in package.json will be ignored by default.

We add some module's peerDependencies to ignore option as default for application size reduction.

• babel-core is required by babel-loader and its size is ~19 MB
• node-libs-browser is required by webpack and its size is ~3MB.

Note: If you want to use any above modules in runtime, for example: require('babel/register'), you should move them from devDependencies to dependencies.

Please checkout Building windows apps from non-windows platforms.

We use webpack-target-electron-renderer to provide a build target for electron renderer process. Read more information here.

Note: webpack >= 1.12.15 has built-in support for electron-main and electron-renderer targets.

If you want to have native-like User Interface (OS X El Capitan and Windows 10), react-desktop may perfect suit for you.

• C. T. Lin
• Jhen-Jie Hong

MIT © C. T. Lin