Building an application

Using ToDesktop to manage your Electron app allows you to build, test, and release your app with confidence. To get started, navigate to ToDesktop, click the create new app button, and select the todesktop platform option.

# Generating an app

If you don't have an existing Electron app, you can use our create-desktop-app NPM package to create a basic application that comes pre-installed with @todesktop/cli and @todesktop/runtime:

        npx create-todesktop-app your-app-name your-app-id`

      

You can then build your desktop app with the following command:

        npm run build

      

This will execute the @todesktop/cli build command and prompt you to log in and enter your registered email address and access token. You can find your access token by clicking your profile dropdown in the web interface and selecting the manage access token option.

# Using an existing app

If you have an existing application, you can instead install @todesktop/cli as a global dependency. The @todesktop/cli package will take care of authentication and programmatically interacting with the ToDesktop platform.

        npm install @todesktop/cli -g

      

Create a todesktop.json file in the root of your Electron project, using the following configuration and changing the properties as needed:

        {
  "id": "your-app-id",
  "icon": "./path-to-icon.png",
  "appPath": ".",
  "schemaVersion": 1
}

      

You may optionally want to include the appFiles property in your todesktop.json. This allows you to decide which files get packed into your app using an array of glob patterns. For example, the following will match all files in the src directory (any level of nesting) that have the .js extension. The package.json, package-lock.json and yarn.lock files are always included if they exist.

        {
  ...,
  "appFiles": ["src/**/*.js"]
}

      

Next, install the @todesktop/runtime package as a project dependency. This will take care of application auto-updating, crash reporting, and more:

        npm install @todesktop/runtime

      

In your main (background process) script, import the package and call the init function. The function should be called as early as possible:

        const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron');
const todesktop = require('@todesktop/runtime');

todesktop.init();

function createWindow() {
  // Create the browser window.
  let win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    webPreferences: {
      nodeIntegration: true
    }
  });

  // and load the index.html of the app.
  win.loadFile('index.html');
}

app.whenReady().then(createWindow);

      

You can then proceed to build your desktop app with the following command:

        todesktop build

      

This will first prompt you to log in and enter your registered email address and access token. You can find your access token by clicking your profile dropdown in the web interface and selecting the manage access token option.

As your application is building, progress updates will be streamed to your project terminal (as a response to invoking the build command) and in the build view on the ToDesktop web interface.

Visit Part 2 of this guide to learn how to sign your build to make it eligible for distribution.