Create an Electron app on Fedora

#fedora #electron #javascript #linux

Creating the Electron App

Wanted to play around with creating a desktop app with Electron on Fedora. Followed the quick start guide for Electron changing the win.loadFile to win.loadURL to load an existing web app. Code is here here is my main.js

const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron')
const path = require('path')

const createWindow = () => {
  const win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 1200,
    height: 850,
    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, 'preload.js')
    }
  })

  win.loadURL('https://austincunningham.github.io/Git_Repos_Rest_API/lab-4.1-Github-API/index.html')

}

app.whenReady().then(() => {
  createWindow()

  app.on('activate', function () {
    if (BrowserWindow.getAllWindows().length === 0) createWindow()
  })

})

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

Testing the app by running npm start and the app opens

That seems straight forward.

Building the binary

Again following the quick start guide I get to the npm run make command here is where I hit some trouble

npm run make

> electron-github@1.0.0 make /home/austincunningham/repo/electron-github
> electron-forge make

✔ Checking your system
✔ Resolving Forge Config

An unhandled rejection has occurred inside Forge:
Error: Cannot make for deb, the following external binaries need to be installed: dpkg, fakeroot

Electron Forge was terminated. Location:

So I install the missing dependencies

sudo dnf install dpkg
sudo dnf install fakeroot

I rerun the npm run make command

npm run make

> electron-github@1.0.0 make /home/austincunningham/repo/electron-github
> electron-forge make

✔ Checking your system
✔ Resolving Forge Config

An unhandled rejection has occurred inside Forge:
Error: Cannot make for rpm, the following external binaries need to be installed: rpmbuild

Electron Forge was terminated. Location:

So I guess there is another missing dependency I try and install rpmbuild

sudo dnf install rpmbuild
No match for argument: rpmbuild
Error: Unable to find a match: rpmbuild

I figure it rpm related so Googled it and find https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/create-rpm-package
I install the dependencies from the blog

sudo dnf install -y rpmdevtools rpmlint

And happy days the npm run make completes

npm run make                            

> electron-github@1.0.0 make /home/austincunningham/repo/electron-github
> electron-forge make

✔ Checking your system
✔ Resolving Forge Config
We need to package your application before we can make it
✔ Preparing to Package Application for arch: x64
✔ Preparing native dependencies
✔ Packaging Application
Making for the following targets: deb, rpm
✔ Making for target: deb - On platform: linux - For arch: x64
✔ Making for target: rpm - On platform: linux - For arch: x64