What is it?

Electron enables you to create desktop applications with pure JavaScript by providing a runtime with rich native (operating system) APIs. You could see it as a variant of the Node.js runtime that is focused on desktop applications instead of web servers.

This doesn't mean Electron is a JavaScript binding to graphical user interface (GUI) libraries. Instead, Electron uses web pages as its GUI, so you could also see it as a minimal Chromium browser, controlled by JavaScript.

Built by

Who uses it?

Competitors?

NW.js

(previously known as node-webkit)

How it works

Getting Started

npm init

npm install electron-prebuilt --save

./node_modules/.bin/electron .

your-app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html

{
  "name"    : "your-app",
  "version" : "0.1.0",
  "main"    : "main.js"
}

Let's build one...

var app = require('app');
var BrowserWindow = require('browser-window');

var mainWindow = null;

app.on('window-all-closed', function() {
  if (process.platform != 'darwin') {
    app.quit();
  }
});

app.on('ready', function() {
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, 
                                  height: 600});

  mainWindow.loadUrl('file://' 
                    + __dirname 
                    + '/index.html');

  mainWindow.on('closed', function() {
    mainWindow = null;
  });
});

package.json

main.js