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FAQ

Why is webpack a good idea for electron?#

Electron apps face huge hurdles when it comes to matching native performance. There's a number of reasons for that. One of those issues is that a main electron app does not have Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation. No optimizations are made to code performance. require() is really slow. Webpack helps us reduce the amount of calls made to require by bundling all our code (when possible) into single file. Atom is slow primarily because it makes so many require statements.

Why use Yarn instead of NPM?#

yarn has some features that npm doesn't, such as module aliasing, workspaces, and plug'n'play. While we're not using any of those features right now, we might in the future.

The collaborators use yarn and our CI's use yarn as well, so we recommend yarn over npm to avoid compatibility problems.

There is nothing stopping anyone from using npm over yarn in their projects, but if they do that and they end up running into bugs because of it, we probably won't be able to help them.

How do I skip building the DLL immediately after install?#

Install the dependency with the --ignore-scripts flag. Here's an example:

yarn add some-dep --ignore-scripts

To always have the --ignore-scripts flag on, you can add this to your yarnrc.

# Your .yarnrc file located in the root of the project or any directories above--ignore-scripts true

To always have the --ignore-scripts flag on for specific commands:

# Your .yarnrc file located in the root of the project or any directories above
# This will set the --ignore-scripts flag whenever running yarn add--add.ignore-scripts true

Why am I having issues spawning an instance of my app?#

There are a few caveats with how child_process.spawn() operates in the context of an Electron app. If you are trying to spawn a packaged binary of your ERB app from a develoment instance (e.g. an instance of your app started with yarn start), you may find that your packaged app starts with issues. This happens because ERB sets some environment variables in yarn start that cause problems when set while spawning a packaged version of the app.

If this is an issue that you face, a workaround is to unset these variables prior to spawning the packaged app:

const newEnvVars = { ...process.env };delete newEnvVars.HOT;delete newEnvVars.START_HOT;newEnvVars.NODE_ENV = "production";spawn("path/to/packaged/app.exe", [...args], {  ...options,  env: { ...newEnvVars },});