Google-music-electron NPM

google-music-electron

Desktop app for Google Music on top of Electron

Features:

Google Music as a standalone application
Tray for quick play/pause/quit and tooltip with information
Media key shortcuts
MPRIS integration (for GNU/Linux desktop environments)

Screenshot

This was written as a successsor to google-music-webkit. When upgrading between versions of nw.js, there were regressions with taskbar and shortcut bindings. We wrote this as an alternative.

Requirements

npm, usually installed with node

Getting Started

google-music-electron can be installed globally via npm:

# Install google-music-electron via npm
npm install -g google-music-electron

# Run google-music-electron
google-music-electron

When the application has launched, it will appear in your taskbar and via a tray icon, .

Screenshot

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MPRIS integration

If you are on GNU/Linux and your desktop environment supports MPRIS, you can install our MPRIS integration via:

google-music-electron install-mpris
# Once this succeeds, MRPIS will be integrated on `google-music-electron` restart

MPRIS screenshot

Updating

google-music-electron can be updated via npm:

# Update google-music-electron to a newer version via npm
npm update -g google-music-electron
# Alternatively, the following can be used as well to specify a version
# npm install -g google-music-electron@latest

Documentation

CLI

We have a few CLI options available for you:

  Usage: google-music-electron [options] [command]


  Commands:

    install-mpris   Install integration with MPRIS (Linux only)

  Options:

    -h, --help                  output usage information
    -V, --version               output the version number
    -S, --skip-taskbar          Skip showing the application in the taskbar
    --minimize-to-tray          Hide window to tray instead of minimizing
    --hide-via-tray             Hide window to tray instead of minimizing (only for tray icon)
    --allow-multiple-instances  Allow multiple instances of `google-music-electron` to run
    --verbose                   Display verbose log output in stdout
    --debug-repl                Starts a `replify` server as `google-music-electron` for debugging

Development

Running locally

To get a local development copy running, you will need:

npm, usually installed with node. Same npm that is used during installation
git, version control tool

Follow the steps below to get a development copy set up:

# Clone our repository
git clone https://github.com/twolfson/google-music-electron.git
cd google-music-electron/

# Install our dependencies and dev dependencies
npm install

# Start up `google-music-electron`
npm start

After running the above steps, a copy of google-music-electron should begin running.

Screenshot

Adding local setup as a global installation

After getting our local development set up, we can go one step further and get google-music-electron working on our CLI as if it were installed via npm install -g.

# Link local copy as a global copy
# WARNING: Make sure that `npm install` has been run before this point
#   or your local copy's permissions may get messed up
npm link

# Run `google-music-electron` for local copy
google-music-electron

More information on npm link can be found in npm's documentation:

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/link

Icons

Source images are kept in the resources/ folder. Icons are maintained via Inkscape and the play/pause buttons are isolated in layers.

To generate icons:

Export each of the play/pause/clean variants as a .svg file
Load the icons via GIMP as a 32x32 SVG
Export via GIMP as a .png

At the time of writing, Inkscape and Image Magick seemed to be generating non-transparent backgrounds upon converting SVG to PNG.

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint via npm run lint and test via npm test.