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ente/desktop/docs/dependencies.md
Manav Rathi 24176d8c40
Document a few more dependencies
2024-03-26 21:42:48 +05:30

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Dependencies

Electron

Electron is a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS) way for creating desktop apps using TypeScript.

Electron embeds Chromium and Node.js in the generated app's binary. The generated app thus consists of two separate processes - the main process, and a renderer process.

  • The main process is runs the embedded node. This process can deal with the host OS - it is conceptually like a node repl running on your machine. In our case, the TypeScript code (in the src/ directory) gets transpiled by tsc into JavaScript in the build/app/ directory, which gets bundled in the generated app's binary and is loaded by the node (main) process when the app starts.

  • The renderer process is a regular web app that gets loaded into the embedded Chromium. When the main process starts, it creates a new "window" that shows this embedded Chromium. In our case, we build and bundle a static export of the Photos web app in the generated app. This gets loaded by the embedded Chromium at runtime, acting as the app's UI.

There is also a third environment that gets temporarily created:

  • The preload script acts as a gateway between the main and the renderer process. It runs in its own isolated environment.

electron-builder

Electron Builder is used for packaging the app for distribution.

During the build it uses electron-builder-notarize to notarize the macOS binary.

electron-updater, while a separate package, is also a part of Electron Builder. It provides an alternative to Electron's built in auto updater, with a more flexible API. It supports auto updates for the DMG, AppImage, DEB, RPM and NSIS packages.

electron-log

electron-log is used for logging. Specifically, it allows us to log to a file (in addition to the console of the Node.js process), and also handles log rotation and limiting the size of the log files.

next-electron-server

This spins up a server for serving files using a protocol handler inside our Electron process. This allows us to directly use the output produced by next build for loading into our renderer process.

Dev

See web/docs/dependencies#DX for the general development experience related dependencies like TypeScript etc, which are similar to that in the web code.

Some extra ones specific to the code here are:

  • concurrently for spawning parallel tasks when we do yarn dev.

  • shx for providing a portable way to use Unix commands in our package.json scripts. This allows us to use the same commands (like ln) across different platforms like Linux and Windows.