To distribute your app with Electron, 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. Note that the location of Electron’s prebuilt binaries is indicated with electron/
in the examples below.
On macOS:
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.
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 macOS:
electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar
On Windows and Linux:
electron/resources/
└── app.asar
More details can be found in Application packaging.
After bundling your app into Electron, you will want to rebrand Electron before distributing it to users.
You can rename electron.exe
to any name you like, and edit its icon and other information with tools like rcedit.
You can rename Electron.app
to any name you want, and you also have to rename the CFBundleDisplayName
, CFBundleIdentifier
and CFBundleName
fields in the 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
You can rename the electron
executable to any name you like.
Apart from packaging your app manually, you can also choose to use third party packaging tools to do the work for you:
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.
Creating a custom fork of Electron is almost certainly not something you will need to do in order to build your app, even for “Production Level” applications. Using a tool such as electron-packager
or electron-forge
will allow you to “Rebrand” Electron without having to do these steps.
You need to fork Electron when you have custom C++ code that you have patched directly into Electron, that either cannot be upstreamed, or has been rejected from the official version. As maintainers of Electron, we very much would like to make your scenario work, so please try as hard as you can to get your changes into the official version of Electron, it will be much much easier on you, and we appreciate your help.
Install Surf, via npm: npm install -g surf-build@latest
Create a new S3 bucket and create the following empty directory structure:
- atom-shell/
- symbols/
- dist/
Set the following Environment Variables:
ELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
- a token that can create releases on GitHubELECTRON_S3_ACCESS_KEY
, ELECTRON_S3_BUCKET
, ELECTRON_S3_SECRET_KEY
- the place where you’ll upload node.js headers as well as symbolsELECTRON_RELEASE
- Set to true
and the upload part will run, leave unset and surf-build
will just do CI-type checks, appropriate to run for every pull request.CI
- Set to true
or else it will failGITHUB_TOKEN
- set it to the same as ELECTRON_GITHUB_TOKEN
SURF_TEMP
- set to C:\Temp
on Windows to prevent path too long issuesTARGET_ARCH
- set to ia32
or x64
In script/upload.py
, you must set ELECTRON_REPO
to your fork (MYORG/electron
), especially if you are a contributor to Electron proper.
surf-build -r https://github.com/MYORG/electron -s YOUR_COMMIT -n 'surf-PLATFORM-ARCH'
Wait a very, very long time for the build to complete.