Application Packaging

    There are a couple tools out there that exist to package and distribute your Electron app. We recommend using . You can check out its documentation directly, or refer to the part of the Electron tutorial.

    Manual packaging

    If you prefer the manual approach, there are 2 ways to distribute your application:

    • With prebuilt binaries
    • With an app source code archive

    To distribute your app manually, you need to download Electron’s prebuilt binaries. Next, the folder containing your app should be named and placed in Electron’s resources directory as shown in the following examples.

    note

    The location of Electron’s prebuilt binaries is indicated with electron/ in the examples below.

    macOS

    Then execute Electron.app on macOS, electron on Linux, or electron.exe on Windows, and Electron will start as your app. The electron directory will then be your distribution to deliver to users.

    Instead of shipping your app by copying all of its source files, you can package your app into an asar archive to improve the performance of reading files on platforms like Windows, if you are not already using a bundler such as Parcel or Webpack.

    To use an asar archive to replace the 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.

    macOS

    Windows

    You can find more details on how to use asar in the .

    • Linux: You can rename the electron executable to any name you like.

    • macOS: You can rename Electron.app to any name you want, and you also have to rename the CFBundleDisplayName, and CFBundleName fields in the following files:

      • Electron.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:

    Application Packaging - 图2note

    Keep in mind this is not recommended as setting up the environment to compile from source is not trivial and takes significant time.