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Here’s the repository: https://github.com/kirill-konshin/next-electron-rsc and the demo with all files.
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Electron’s native way of providing access to system APIs is via IPC or, god forbid, Electron Remote (which was considered even harmful). Both were always a bit cumbersome. Don’t get me wrong, you can get the job done: this and this typed IPC interfaces were the best I found. But with IPC in large apps you’ll end up designing some handshake protocol for simple request-response interaction, handling of errors and loading states and so on, so in real enterprise grade applications it will quickly become too heavy. Not even close to elegance of RSC.
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At the same time, Electron is a de-facto standard for modern desktop apps written using web technologies, especially when application must have filesystem and other system API access, while being written in JS (Tauri receives an honorable mention here if you know Rust or if you only need a simple WebView2 shell).
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After some research I found an obvious choice called Nextron. Unfortunately, seems like it does not utilize the full power of Next.js, and does not support SSR (ticket remained open in Oct 2024). On the other hand there are articles like this or this, both very close, except for usage of server with an open port. Unfortunately I only found it after I came up with the approach I’m about to present, but the article validated it. Luckily I found it before writing this post, so I can give kudos to the author here.
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Honorable mention here goes to awesome Electron Serve, which implements a custom schema for serving static files.
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P.P.S. MSW is a bit overkill and is used for different purposes, like other HTTP mocking libraries.
