bundling precompiled binary into electron app

Here’s another method, tested with Mac and Windows so far. Requires ‘app-root-dir’ package, doesn’t require adding anything manually to node_modules dir.

1. Put your files under resources/$os/, where $os is either “mac”, “linux”, or “win”. The build process will copy files from those directories as per build target OS.

2. Put extraFiles option in your build configs as follows:

package.json

  "build": {
    "extraFiles": [
      {
        "from": "resources/${os}",
        "to": "Resources/bin",
        "filter": ["**/*"]
      }
    ],

3. Use something like this to determine the current platform.

get-platform.js

import { platform } from 'os';

export default () => {
  switch (platform()) {
    case 'aix':
    case 'freebsd':
    case 'linux':
    case 'openbsd':
    case 'android':
      return 'linux';
    case 'darwin':
    case 'sunos':
      return 'mac';
    case 'win32':
      return 'win';
  }
};

4. Call the executable from your app depending on env and OS. Here I am assuming built versions are in production mode and source versions in other modes, but you can create your own calling logic.

import { join as joinPath, dirname } from 'path';
import { exec } from 'child_process';

import appRootDir from 'app-root-dir';

import env from './env';
import getPlatform from './get-platform';

const execPath = (env.name === 'production') ?
  joinPath(dirname(appRootDir.get()), 'bin'):
  joinPath(appRootDir.get(), 'resources', getPlatform());

const cmd = `${joinPath(execPath, 'my-executable')}`;

exec(cmd, (err, stdout, stderr) => {
  // do things
});

I think I was using electron-builder as base, the env file generation comes with it. Basically it’s just a JSON config file.