Get Started with Writing Desktop Apps with Electron

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Electron is a framework that lets us create cross-platform desktop apps.

The apps are created by creating web apps that are wrapped with a wrapper.

In this article, we’ll look at how to create our first Electron app.

Getting Started

We’ve to use a recent version of Node.js to create our desktop app.

First, we install Electron by running:

npm install --save-dev electron

To create the app, we create a project folder and run npm init --yes to create a package.json file.

Then we add the main.js to as the value of main .

This defines the entry point of our app.

The whole package.json file would look something like:

{
  "name": "electron-example",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "main.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "electron ."
  },
  "repository": {
    "type": "git",
    "url": "git+https://hauyeung@bitbucket.org/hauyeung/electron-example.git"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "homepage": "https://bitbucket.org/hauyeung/electron-example#readme"
}