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ente/desktop/docs/dependencies.md

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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.

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.

electron-reload

Reloads contents of the BrowserWindow (renderer process) when source files are changed.

  • TODO (MR): Do we need this? Isn't the next-electron-server HMR covering this?

DX

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.