I am a beginner to angular and a complete noob to electron. I was wondering if it would be possible to port an existing angular app to electron by using most of the existing codebase of the webapp?
I found a couple of links on this but not much on Google. Most results talk about starting with angular and electron to create a desktop app - which is my intention but I would like to use most of my existing code base and ideally just add webpack and electron related config to compile the electon app from existing codebase as I don't want to maintain two version of the same codebase.
I could use this bridge to access Electron API (although I am not sure how it will all hang together)
https://github.com/develephant/ngElectron
What do usually people do?
Here are the steps I took to add Electron to an existing AngularJS app.
1. Clone an existing Angular app git clone https://github.com/angular/angular-seed.git
.
2. cd angular-seed
.
3. npm install --save electron
.
4. In /app, create a main.js file and paste:
const electron = require('electron')
// Module to control application life.
const app = electron.app
// Module to create native browser window.
const BrowserWindow = electron.BrowserWindow
// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
let mainWindow
function createWindow () {
// Create the browser window.
mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, height: 600})
// and load the index.html of the app.
mainWindow.loadURL(`file://${__dirname}/index.html`)
// Open the DevTools.
//mainWindow.webContents.openDevTools()
// Emitted when the window is closed.
mainWindow.on('closed', function () {
// Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
// in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
// when you should delete the corresponding element.
mainWindow = null
})
}
// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
// Some APIs can only be used after this event occurs.
app.on('ready', createWindow)
// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', function () {
// On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
// to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
app.quit()
}
})
app.on('activate', function () {
// On OS X it's common to re-create a window in the app when the
// dock icon is clicked and there are no other windows open.
if (mainWindow === null) {
createWindow()
}
})
// In this file you can include the rest of your app's specific main process
// code. You can also put them in separate files and require them here.
- In /app, create a blank renderer.js file.
- In root of package.json add
"main": "main.js"
.
- In "scripts" section of package.json change "start" to
"start": "electron ."
.
npm install && npm start
.