electron-builder VS concurrently

The last step for each platform's build process is to upload the app to our GitHub releases repository. We automated this step from the beginning, but when we started creating builds for the new M1 chip Macs, we had to add a manual step. This involved merging files needed for the auto-updater to work with the M1 builds.

https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues... that issue kinks to the PR that adds the automation.

It's a non-trivial thing to test, since it involves so many secrets and the notarization step can take over an hour, so I don't expect anyone here to actually want to look into it.

My original comment really was just venting my frustration, not a cry for help (but I might be crying soon if I can get to the bottom of this!).

> The ‘autoupdater’ does three things,

>

> - check the app for updates (using Sparkle)

> - report any crashes (using Sentry)

> - start a local HTTP proxy on port 40701 (this can be changed using the configuration json file in the app bundle).

>

> The latter is of course, not to be expected of any app on the machine, especially not one that just claims to be an auto updater.

Well, yes. And no.

For example, electron-builder [^0], a popular framework used for Electron app packaging and auto-updates, uses a local update server on Mac [^1] to add a more sane system backed by a more insane system, Squirrel.

[^0]: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder

[^1]: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/blob/m...

The Project uses Electorn-Builder to package the app and Electorn-Updater to update.

You can read about this issue here: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/7114

Ostara is based off of electron-react-boilerplate and uses electron-builder to package the application.

Install electron and electron-builder

I believe Visual Studio Code uses Electron and posts releases on a regular basis. Maybe check their A quick Google search for "electron build github release" turns up "Electron Builder" https://www.electron.build/ I don't really know though; I've never used Electron.

I also would like to have an NSIS installer so if it happens to package the Chromium executable along with my app, how can I accomplish that? I am using electron-builder.

We use electron-builder at work.

Before we begin, it's essential to ensure that we have Tailwind CSS and Concurrently installed. Tailwind CSS utility classes will be used for styling our project and will not affect the functionality. Concurrently will allow us to run our React frontend and server file simultaneously on our machines. For now, knowing the purpose that Concurrently serves is enough. We will see how to make it work later in the article.

To efficiently develop and test these applications, it’s essential to run React and Express servers simultaneously. One option is to manually start each server using separate terminal windows or tabs, but this approach is cumbersome and inefficient. An option is to use the concurrently or npm-run-all  CLI tools designed to run multiple npm-scripts in parallel or sequentially.

Let's configure our scripts in the package.json file to launch JSON-Server, to make the process easier we will use Concurrently, an NPM package that allow us to run multiple commands simultaneously.

[1] https://metatype.dev [2] https://github.com/metatypedev/metatype/blob/main/whiz.yaml [3] https://actix.rs/docs/actix/actor/ [4] https://github.com/open-cli-tools/concurrently

Lastly if you want to run your dev build tool and backend as a single command you could try something like pm2 (https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2) or concurrently (https://www.npmjs.com/package/concurrently). This isn't necessary but might be a nice-to-have. NPM workspaces could help you organize this with a common package.json file too. (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/using-npm/workspaces)

We attempted to use a combination of tsc --watch, concurrently and Nodemon, but started to run into things breaking left and right, e.g.

Now, the tsconfig.vitest.json seems to be the most "complete" (it will check app files as well as test files), so it's a good choice if you really had to choose one config and run with it (and you still get type checking in the IDE for each config). But, this doesn't include the files from tsconfig.config.json, and as an app grows, the "app" and "vitest" configs may diverge, so wouldn't it be best to use something like concurrently or npm-run-all to run vue-tsc against all 3 configs?