Part 3. Deploying Electron applications

In part 2, we built a number of applications, but each shared a common flaw: our users would need to navigate to the appropriate directory using the command line and have Node.js installed to start the application. This isn’t exactly ideal. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, things don’t have to be this way. That’s not the way I started Slack this morning. Part 3 covers the intricacies of packaging and distributing our wonderful applications.

Chapter 14 directly takes on the problem I illustrated in the previous paragraph by introducing us to two different ways to package our applications for distribution. We’ll create standalone versions of Fire Sale and Jetsetter in the process. In chapter 15, I’ll address a fear that may or may not have crossed your mind: how do we know if our application is working as intended once we release it into the wild? We’ll wire up Fire Sale with Electron’s built-in crash reporter. We’ll also set up a simple server to receive and keep track of crash reports. Full-on crashes are not the only issue our users might come across. We’ll also build our own ability to capture uncaught exceptions and report them to our server as well. This is above and beyond what Electron gives us out of the box, but, ultimately, it is fairly simple to implement.

Chapter 16 discusses how to get your application prepped and ready for the Mac App Store. You, by no means, have to go down this route, but it does solve some of the problems that you might come across if you decide that you’d like to get rich off of your Electron applications.