Electron Documentation1.7.8

Docs / Tutorial / Electron Versioning

Electron Versioning

If you’ve been using Node and npm for a while, you are probably aware of Semantic Versioning, or SemVer for short. It’s a convention for specifying version numbers for software that helps communicate intentions to the users of your software.

Overview of Semantic Versioning

Semantic versions are always made up of three numbers:

major.minor.patch

Semantic version numbers are bumped (incremented) using the following rules:

A simple mnemonic for remembering this scheme is as follows:

breaking.feature.fix

Electron Versioning

Due to its dependency on Node and Chromium, it is not possible for the Electron project to adhere to a SemVer policy. You should therefore always reference a specific version of Electron.

Electron version numbers are bumped using the following rules:

We recommend that you set a fixed version when installing Electron from npm:

npm install electron --save-exact --save-dev

The --save-exact flag will add electron to your package.json file without using a ^ or ~, e.g. 1.6.2 instead of ^1.6.2. This practice ensures that all upgrades of Electron are a manual operation made by you, the developer.

Alternatively, you can use the ~ prefix in your SemVer range, like ~1.6.2. This will lock your major and minor version, but allow new patch versions to be installed.


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