electron-window

Convenience methods for Electron windows.

Installation

npm i --save electron-window

Usage

TL;DR:

electron-window converts this:

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

const path = require('path')
const url = require('url')

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the javascript object is GCed.
let mainWindow = null

app.on('ready', () => {
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({ width: 1000, height: 400, show: false })

  const someArgs = { data: 'hi' }
  const indexPath = path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'weird-location', 'index.html')
  const indexUrl = url.format({
    protocol: 'file',
    pathname: indexPath,
    slashes: true,
    hash: encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(someArgs))
  })

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

  mainWindow.webContents.on('did-finish-load', () => {
    mainWindow.show()
    console.log('window is now visible!')
  })

  mainWindow.loadUrl(indexUrl)
})

to this:

const { app } = require('electron')
const path = require('path')
const window = require('electron-window')

app.on('ready', () => {
  const mainWindow = window.createWindow({ width: 1000, height: 400 })
  const someArgs = { data: 'hi' }
  const indexPath = path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'weird-location', 'index.html')
  
  mainWindow.showUrl(indexPath, someArgs, () => {
    console.log('window is now visible!')
  })
})

API Methods

createWindow(options)

Class method that creates a new BrowserWindow with the following default options: { show: false }. No need to worry about keeping a global reference to prevent garbage collection, this is handled for you.

parseArgs()

Instance method to parse arguments in window. You would only need to call from your renderer preload script if you pass in preload.

showUrl(httpOrFileUrl, [argsForRenderer], [callback])

Instance method that shows the url. When the url is finished loading, the callback is returned. If the optional argsForRenderer is set then __args__ will be a global object for the page in the renderer process. This is a convenient way to pass arguments from the main process to the renderer process.

unref()

Instance method to call if you ever want to remove the global reference. Should only need to be called if destroy() is ever called. Most likely, you won't need to use this.

API Properties

windows

Class property to get a reference to all windows created and their ids. This is in the form of an object where the keys are window ids, and the values are instances of BrowserWindow.

Example

main process

const window = require('electron-window')

const windowOptions = {
  width: 1000,
  height: 400
}

const mainWindow = window.createWindow(windowOptions)

// can access at window.__args__ from scripts
// ran from index.html
const args = {
  data: 'some secret data'
}

mainWindow.showUrl('index.html', args, () => {
  console.log('the window should be showing with the contents of the URL now')
})

renderer process

// only call if `preload` is set in `windowOptions`
require('electron-window').parseArgs()

console.log(window.__args__)
// => Object {data: "some secret data"}