grunt-electron-installer-debian

Create a Debian package for your Electron app.

Not a fan of Grunt? Use the vanilla module electron-installer-debian!

Requirements

This tool requires fakeroot and dpkg to build the .deb package.

I'd recommend building your packages on your target platform, but if you insist on using Mac OS X, you can install these tools through Homebrew:

$ brew install fakeroot dpkg

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.0

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-electron-installer-debian --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-electron-installer-debian')

This plugin was designed to work with Grunt 0.4.x. If you're still using grunt v0.3.x it's strongly recommended that you upgrade, but in case you can't please use v0.3.2.

Installer task

Run this task with the grunt electron-installer-debian command.

Task targets, files and options may be specified according to the grunt Configuring tasks guide.

Usage

Say your Electron app lives in path/to/app, and has a structure like this:

.
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── node_modules
│   ├── electron-packager
│   └── electron-prebuilt
├── package.json
├── resources
│   ├── Icon.png
│   ├── IconTemplate.png
│   └── IconTemplate@2x.png
└── src
    ├── index.js
    ├── main
    │   └── index.js
    └── renderer
        ├── index.html
        └── index.js

You now run electron-packager to build the app for Debian:

$ electron-packager . app --platform linux --arch x64 --out dist/

And you end up with something like this in your dist folder:

.
└── dist
    └── app-linux-x64
        ├── LICENSE
        ├── LICENSES.chromium.html
        ├── content_shell.pak
        ├── app
        ├── icudtl.dat
        ├── libgcrypt.so.11
        ├── libnode.so
        ├── locales
        ├── natives_blob.bin
        ├── resources
        ├── snapshot_blob.bin
        └── version

In order to create a .deb package for your app, the configuration for your Grunt task would look like this:

'electron-installer-debian': {
  app: {
    options: {
      arch: 'amd64'
    },
    src: 'path/to/app/dist/app-linux-x64',
    dest: 'path/to/app/dist/installers/'
  }
}

The task will try to extract all necessary information from your package.json, and then generate your package at path/to/app/dist/installers/.

You can also create different packages for different architectures, while manually overriding certain options:

'electron-installer-debian': {
  options: {
    productName: 'Foo',
    productDescription: 'Bar baz qux.',
    section: 'devel',
    priority: 'optional',
    categories: [
      'Utility'
    ],
    lintianOverrides: [
      'changelog-file-missing-in-native-package',
      'executable-not-elf-or-script',
      'extra-license-file'
    ]
  },
 
  linux32: {
    options: {
      arch: 'i386'
    },
    src: 'path/to/app/dist/app-linux-ia32',
    dest: 'path/to/app/dist/installers/'
  },
 
  linux64: {
    options: {
      arch: 'amd64'
    },
    src: 'path/to/app/dist/app-linux-x64',
    dest: 'path/to/app/dist/installers/'
  }
}

Options

See the options supported by electron-installer-debian.

Meta

• Code: git clone git://github.com/unindented/grunt-electron-installer-debian.git
• Home: https://github.com/unindented/grunt-electron-installer-debian/

Contributors

• Daniel Perez Alvarez (unindented@gmail.com)

License

Copyright (c) 2016 Daniel Perez Alvarez (unindented.org). This is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.