Application Distribution
To distribute your app with Electron, the folder containing your app should be
named app
and placed under Electron's resources directory (on OS X it is
Electron.app/Contents/Resources/
and on Linux and Windows it is resources/
),
like this:
On OS X:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/app
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html
Then execute Electron.app
(or electron
on Linux, electron.exe
on Windows),
and Electron will start as your app. The electron
directory will then be
your distribution to deliver to final users.
Packaging Your App into a File
Apart from shipping your app by copying all of its source files, you can also package your app into an asar archive to avoid exposing your app's source code to users.
To use an asar
archive to replace the app
folder, you need to rename the
archive to app.asar
, and put it under Electron's resources directory like
below, and Electron will then try to read the archive and start from it.
On OS X:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/
└── app.asar
More details can be found in Application packaging.
Rebranding with Downloaded Binaries
After bundling your app into Electron, you will want to rebrand Electron before distributing it to users.
Windows
You can rename electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other
information with tools like rcedit.
OS X
You can rename Electron.app
to any name you want, and you also have to rename
the CFBundleDisplayName
, CFBundleIdentifier
and CFBundleName
fields in
following files:
Electron.app/Contents/Info.plist
Electron.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist
You can also rename the helper app to avoid showing Electron Helper
in the
Activity Monitor, but make sure you have renamed the helper app's executable
file's name.
The structure of a renamed app would be like:
MyApp.app/Contents
├── Info.plist
├── MacOS/
│ └── MyApp
└── Frameworks/
├── MyApp Helper EH.app
| ├── Info.plist
| └── MacOS/
| └── MyApp Helper EH
├── MyApp Helper NP.app
| ├── Info.plist
| └── MacOS/
| └── MyApp Helper NP
└── MyApp Helper.app
├── Info.plist
└── MacOS/
└── MyApp Helper
Linux
You can rename the electron
executable to any name you like.
Rebranding by Rebuilding Electron from Source
It is also possible to rebrand Electron by changing the product name and
building it from source. To do this you need to modify the atom.gyp
file and
have a clean rebuild.
grunt-build-atom-shell
Manually checking out Electron's code and rebuilding could be complicated, so a Grunt task has been created that will handle this automatically: grunt-build-atom-shell.
This task will automatically handle editing the .gyp
file, building from
source, then rebuilding your app's native Node modules to match the new
executable name.
Packaging Tools
Apart from packaging your app manually, you can also choose to use third party packaging tools to do the work for you: