Electron-serve NPM

electron-serve

Static file serving for Electron apps

Normally you would just use win.loadURL('file://…'), but that doesn't work when you're making a single-page web app, which most Electron apps are today, as history.pushState()'ed URLs don't exist on disk. It serves files if they exist, and falls back to index.html if not, which means you can use router modules like react-router, vue-router, etc.

Install

npm install electron-serve

Requires Electron 8 or later.

Usage

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

const loadURL = serve({directory: 'renderer'});

let mainWindow;

(async () => {
	await app.whenReady();

	mainWindow = new BrowserWindow();

	await loadURL(mainWindow);

	// Or optionally with search parameters.
	await loadURL(mainWindow, {id: 4, foo: 'bar'});

	// The above is equivalent to this:
	await mainWindow.loadURL('app://-');
	// The `-` is just the required hostname
})();

API

loadUrl = serve(options)

options

Type: object

scheme

Type: string\ Default: 'app'

Custom scheme. For example, foo results in your directory being available at foo://-.

hostname

Type: string\ Default: '-'

Custom hostname.

file

Type: string\ Default: 'index'

Custom HTML filename. This gets appended with '.html'.

isCorsEnabled

Type: boolean\ Default: true

Whether CORS should be enabled. Useful for testing purposes.

partition

Type: string\ Default: electron.session.defaultSession

The partition where the protocol should be installed, if not using Electron's default partition.

loadUrl(window, searchParameters?)

The serve function returns a loadUrl function, which you use to serve your HTML file in that window.

window

Required\ Type: BrowserWindow

The window to load the file in.

searchParameters

Type: object | URLSearchParams

Key value pairs or an URLSearchParams instance to set as the search parameters.

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