Application Distribution
You can use the following tools to distribute your application:
These tools will take care of all the steps you need to take to end up with a distributable Electron application, such as bundling your application, rebranding the executable, and setting the right icons.
You can check the example of how to package your app with in the .
To distribute your app manually, you need to download Electron’s prebuilt
binaries. Next, the folder
containing your app should be named app
and placed in Electron’s resources
directory as shown in the following examples.
On 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 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 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 macOS:
On Windows and Linux:
You can find more details on how to use asar
in the
electron/asar
repository.
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:
Windows
You can rename electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other
information with tools like .
Linux
You can rename the electron
executable to any name you like.
It is also possible to rebrand Electron by changing the product name and
building it from source. To do this you need to set the build argument
corresponding to the product name ()
in the args.gn
file and rebuild.