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This repository has been archived by the owner on Jul 30, 2022. It is now read-only.

pbarbiero/basic-electron-react-boilerplate

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Modern and Minimal Electron + React Starter Kit

Electron, React, Webpack -- Modern and up-to-date, with a handful of quality of life features included

I made this starter kit as most boilerplates were either out-of-date, heavy handed, or enforced a structure on me that I just didnt like. With a very select assortment of modules, this starter kit is designed to get you up and running very quickly, and to let you easily drop in your own structure and tools on top of it. The basic structure of src/ is intentionally minimal to make it easier to allow you to put your own twist on how you like things laid out.

Production builds babel-minify is used, and ES2015/ES6 transpilation is provided -- As modern node and chromium versions support 99%+ of the ES6 feature set, I feel those steps are unnecessary.

If you like this project, check out enhanced-electron-react-boilerplate which is this project with my take on additional modules (photon, redux, less, css modules etc) and my personal project structure (based on the redux ducks proposal) I suggest you give it a look if you want less of a minimalistic take on my starter kit.

To get started:

  • Run npm install
Development
  • Run npm run dev to start webpack-dev-server. Electron will launch automatically after compilation.
Production

You have two options, an automatic build or two manual steps

One Shot
  • Run npm run package to have webpack compile your application into dist/bundle.js and dist/index.html, and then an electron-packager run will be triggered for the current platform/arch, outputting to builds/
Manual

Recommendation: Update the "postpackage" script call in package.json to specify parameters as you choose and use the npm run package command instead of running these steps manually

  • Run npm run build to have webpack compile and output your bundle to dist/bundle.js
  • Then you can call electron-packager directly with any commands you choose

If you want to test the production build (In case you think Babili might be breaking something) after running npm run build you can then call npm run prod. This will cause electron to load off of the dist/ build instead of looking for the webpack-dev-server instance. Electron will launch automatically after compilation.