Vite Electron Builder Template

Vite+Electron = 🔥

This is a secure template for electron applications. Written following the latest safety requirements, recommendations and best practices.

Under the hood is used Vite 2.0 — super fast, nextgen bundler, and electron-builder for compilation.

By default, the Vue framework is used for the interface, but you can easily use any other frameworks such as React, Preact, Angular, Svelte or anything else.

Vite is framework agnostic

Support

This template maintained by Alex Kozack. You can 💖 sponsor him for continued development of this template.

If you have ideas, questions or suggestions - Welcome to discussions. 😊

Recommended requirements

• Node: >=14.16
• npm: >7.6

Features

Electron

• Template use the latest electron version with all the latest security patches.
• The architecture of the application is built according to the security guids and best practices.
• The latest version of the electron-builder is used to compile the application.

Vite

• Vite is used to bundle all source codes. This is an extremely fast packer that has a bunch of great features. You can learn more about how it is arranged in this video.
• Vite supports reading .env files. My template has a separate command to generate .d.ts file with type definition your environment variables.

Vite provides you with many useful features, such as: TypeScript, TSX/JSX, CSS/JSON Importing, CSS Modules, Web Assembly and much more.

See all Vite features.

TypeScript (optional)

• The Latest TypeScript is used for all source code.
• Vite supports TypeScript out of the box. However, it does not support type checking.
• Type checking is performed in both .ts and .vue files thanks to @vuedx/typecheck.
• Code formatting rules follow the latest TypeScript recommendations and best practices thanks to @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin.

Note: If you do not need a TypeScript, you can easily abandon it. To do this, You do not need to make any bundler configuration changes, etc. Just replace all .ts files with .js files. Additionally, it will be useful to delete TS-specific files, plug-ins and dependencies like tsconfig.json, @typescript-eslint/*, etc.

Vue (optional)

• By default, web pages are built using the latest version of the Vue. However, there are no problems with using any other frameworks or technologies.
• Also, by default, the vue-router version is included.
• Code formatting rules follow the latest Vue recommendations and best practices thanks to eslint-plugin-vue.
• Installed Vue.js devtools beta with Vue 3 support.

Continuous Integration

• The configured workflow for check the types for each push and PR.
• The configured workflow for check the code style for each push and PR.
• Automatic tests used spectron. Simple, automated test check:
  • Does the main window open
  • Is the main window not empty
  • Is dev tools closed

Continuous deployment

• An automatic update from GitHub releases is supported.
• Each time you push changes to the main branch, a workflow starts, which creates a new github release.
  • The version number is automatically set based on the current date in the format "yy.mm.dd".
  • Notes are automatically generated and added to the new release.

Status

• ✅ Building main and renderer endpoints in production mode — works great.
• ✅ Development mode with hot reload for renderer endpoint — works great.
• ⚠ Development mode for main and preload endpoints — work fine, but it is possible to reboot the backend faster (vite#1434)
• ✅ Compile the app with electron builder in CD — work.
• ✅ Auto update — work.
• ⚠ Typechecking in .ts and .vue files — work thanks . Improvement needed.
• ⚠ Linting — work fine, but need review the configuration files and refactor its.
• ✅ Vue.js devtools beta.
• ⏳ Code signing — planned.

How it works

The template required a minimum dependencies. Only Vite is used for building, nothing more.

Using electron API in renderer

As per the security requirements, context isolation is enabled in this template.

Context Isolation is a feature that ensures that both your preload scripts and Electron's internal logic run in a separate context to the website you load in a webContents. This is important for security purposes as it helps prevent the website from accessing Electron internals or the powerful APIs your preload script has access to.

This means that the window object that your preload script has access to is actually a different object than the website would have access to. For example, if you set window.hello = 'wave' in your preload script and context isolation is enabled window.hello will be undefined if the website tries to access it.

Read more about Context Isolation.

Exposing APIs from your preload script to the renderer is a common usecase and there is a dedicated module in Electron to help you do this in a painless way.

// /src/preload/index.ts
const api = {
  data: ['foo', 'bar'],
  doThing: () => ipcRenderer.send('do-a-thing')
}

contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('electron', api)

To access this API use the useElectron() function:

// /src/renderer/App.vue
import {useElectron} from '/@/use/electron'

const {doThing, data} = useElectron()

Note: Context isolation disabled for test environment. See #693.

Modes and Environment Variables

All environment variables set as part of the import.meta, so you can access them as follows: import.meta.env.

You can also build type definitions of your variables by running bin/buildEnvTypes.js. This command will create types/env.d.ts file with describing all environment variables for all modes.

The mode option is used to specify the value of import.meta.env.MODE and the corresponding environment variables files that needs to be loaded.

By default, there are two modes:

• production is used by default
• development is used by npm run watch script
• test is used by npm test script

When running building, environment variables are loaded from the following files in your project root:

.env                # loaded in all cases
.env.local          # loaded in all cases, ignored by git
.env.[mode]         # only loaded in specified env mode
.env.[mode].local   # only loaded in specified env mode, ignored by git

Note: only variables prefixed with VITE_ are exposed to your code (e.g. VITE_SOME_KEY=123) and SOME_KEY=123 will not. you can access VITE_SOME_KEY using import.meta.env.VITE_SOME_KEY. This is because the .env files may be used by some users for server-side or build scripts and may contain sensitive information that should not be exposed in code shipped to browsers.

Project Structure

• src Contains all source code.
  • src/main Contain entrypoint for Electron main script.
  • src/renderer Contain entrypoint for Electron web page. All files in this directory work as a regular Vue application.
  • src/preload Contain entrypoint for custom script. It uses as preload script in BrowserWindow.webPreferences.preload. See Checklist: Security Recommendations.
  • src/* It is assumed any entry points will be added here, for custom scripts, web workers, webassembly compilations, etc.
• dist
  • dist/source Contains all bundled code.
    • dist/source/main Bundled main entrypoint.
    • dist/source/renderer Bundled renderer entrypoint.
    • dist/source/preload Bundled preload entrypoint.
    • dist/source/* Bundled any custom files.
  • dist/app Contain packages and ready-to-distribute electron apps for any platform. Files in this directory created using electron-builder.
• config Contains various configuration files for Vite, TypeScript, electron builder, etc.
• bin It is believed any scripts for build the application will be located here.
• types Contains all declaration files to be applied globally to the entire project
• tests Contains all tests

Development Setup

This project was tested on Node 14.

1. Fork this repository
2. Run npm install to install all dependencies
3. Build compile app for production — npm run compile
4. Run development environment with file watching — npm run watch
5. Run tests — npm test