Getting Started

Quickly scaffold an Electron project with a full build pipeline

Electron Forge is an all-in-one tool for packaging and distributing Electron applications. It combines many single-purpose packages to create a full build pipeline that works out of the box, complete with code signing, installers, and artifact publishing. For advanced workflows, custom build logic can be added in the Forge lifecycle through its Plugin API. Custom build and storage targets can be handled by creating your own Makers and Publishers.

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥ v16.4.0

• Git

• A JavaScript package manager:

  • npm

  • Yarn Classic

  • pnpm (as of Forge v7.7.0)

Packaging requires node_modules to be on disk

When packaging your Electron app, Forge crawls your project's node_modules folder to collect dependencies to bundle. Its module resolution algorithm is naive and doesn't take into account symlinked dependencies nor Yarn's Plug'n'Play (PnP) format.

• If you are using Yarn >=2, please use the nodeLinker: node-modules install mode.

• If you are using pnpm, please set node-linker=hoisted in your project's .npmrc configuration.

Creating a new app

To get started with Electron Forge, we first need to initialize a new project with create-electron-app. This script is a convenient wrapper around Forge's Init command.

npx create-electron-app@latest my-app

Using templates

Forge's initialization scripts can add additional template code with the --template=[template-name] flag.

npx create-electron-app@latest my-app --template=webpack

There are currently four first-party templates:

• webpack

• webpack-typescript

• vite

• vite-typescript

All of these templates are built around plugins that bundle your JavaScript code for production and includes a dev server to provide a better developer experience.

We highly recommend using these templates when initializing your app to take advantage of modern front-end JavaScript tooling.

To learn more about authoring your own templates for Electron Forge, check out the Writing Templates guide!

Starting your app

You should now have a directory called my-app with all the files you need for a basic Electron app.

cd my-app
npm start

Building distributables

So you've got an amazing application there, and you want to package it all up and share it with the world. If you run the make script, Electron Forge will generate you platform specific distributables for you to share with everyone. For more information on what kind of distributables you can make, check out the Makers documentation.

npm run make

Publishing your app

Now you have distributables that you can share with your users. If you run the publish script, Electron Forge will then publish the platform-specific distributables for you, using the publishing method of your choice. For example, if you want to publish your assets to GitHub, you can install the GitHub publisher dependency using:

npm install --save-dev @electron-forge/publisher-github

Once you have configured the publisher according to the documentation, run the following command to upload your distributables:

npm run publish

For more information on what publishers we currently support, check out the Publishers documentation.

Advanced Usage

Once you've got a basic app starting, building and publishing, it's time to add your custom configuration, which can be done in the forge.config.js file. Configuration options are specified in the Configuration Docs.

You can also check out the documentation on some of our more advanced features like:

• Adding plugins

• Debugging your app

• Writing your own makers, publishers and plugins