The source code of Electron is separated into a few parts, mostly following Chromium on the separation conventions.
You may need to become familiar with Chromium’s multi-process architecture to understand the source code better.
Electron
├── atom/ - C++ source code.
| ├── app/ - System entry code.
| ├── browser/ - The frontend including the main window, UI, and all of the
| | main process things. This talks to the renderer to manage web pages.
| | ├── ui/ - Implementation of UI stuff for different platforms.
| | | ├── cocoa/ - Cocoa specific source code.
| | | ├── win/ - Windows GUI specific source code.
| | | └── x/ - X11 specific source code.
| | ├── api/ - The implementation of the main process APIs.
| | ├── net/ - Network related code.
| | ├── mac/ - Mac specific Objective-C source code.
| | └── resources/ - Icons, platform-dependent files, etc.
| ├── renderer/ - Code that runs in renderer process.
| | └── api/ - The implementation of renderer process APIs.
| └── common/ - Code that used by both the main and renderer processes,
| including some utility functions and code to integrate node's message
| loop into Chromium's message loop.
| └── api/ - The implementation of common APIs, and foundations of
| Electron's built-in modules.
├── chromium_src/ - Source code that copied from Chromium.
├── default_app/ - The default page to show when Electron is started without
| providing an app.
├── docs/ - Documentations.
├── lib/ - JavaScript source code.
| ├── browser/ - Javascript main process initialization code.
| | └── api/ - Javascript API implementation.
| ├── common/ - JavaScript used by both the main and renderer processes
| | └── api/ - Javascript API implementation.
| └── renderer/ - Javascript renderer process initialization code.
| └── api/ - Javascript API implementation.
├── spec/ - Automatic tests.
├── electron.gyp - Building rules of Electron.
└── common.gypi - Compiler specific settings and building rules for other
components like `node` and `breakpad`.
script, scripts put here should never be invoked by users directly.third_party as name because it would confuse it with the same directory in Chromium’s source code tree.ninja.script/create-dist.py script when creating a distribution.gyp.The Electron repository has a few vendored dependencies, found in the /vendor directory. Occasionally you might see a message like this when running git status:
$ git status
modified: vendor/libchromiumcontent (new commits)
modified: vendor/node (new commits)
To update these vendored dependencies, run the following command:
git submodule update --init --recursive
If you find yourself running this command often, you can create an alias for it in your ~/.gitconfig file:
[alias]
su = submodule update --init --recursive