TL;DR

  1. Story time
  2. Using Electron-CLI
  3. Common problems with node tools in bash command line
  4. All things made easy by Electron-CLI

Story time

I decided to make a project in Electron.

I usually start by finding a simple tutorial. These days I use Tutorials point. The tutorial isn’t fresh and some parts can be done better, or only more comfortable, which I will point out.

Using Electron-CLI

For starters, the tutorial prefers to show you the hard way when creating an Electron application. But I learned there is a better solution. You can install a great node tool - electron-cli.

I suggest to install it globally (as all tools):

npm install -g electron-cli

And then initialise the project:

electron-cli init directory-name

The CLI will create a directory, so perhaps it is better not to make a directory upfront if you’re beginning app development.

And… that’s it.

Although it was not just that’s it when I tried it at first :-)

Common problems with node tools in bash command line

If you use Windows 10, as I do, you might encounter an error message like this:

electron: command not found

Searching for a solution I found this. It appears that you just need to add %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\npm to your environment variables and restart your terminal.

This time, that’s it.

All things made easy by Electron-CLI

Using it for the first time, you can observe some faciliations:

  • The newly created project will already be a node.js application.
  • A git repo will be already created.
  • The main files (main.js, index.html, .gitignore and packages.json) are already committed with an initial commit.
  • The main.js file will have comments describing what are all the JavaScript instructions doing.
  • The main.js will contain an optional call to show Dev Tools to the user. Now you know how to call it.

Now, let’s make an app :-)