Unlock the Power of Electron App Development with Vite
The wait is over! Vite support for Electron is now available, revolutionizing the way we build and develop desktop applications. With the electron-vite package, you can harness the speed and capabilities of Vite to improve your Electron app development experience. In this article, we’ll delve into the world of electron-vite, exploring its features and benefits, and even building a simple Electron app with a React frontend.
Prerequisites
Before we dive in, make sure you have the following:
- A high-level understanding of Electron and React
- Node.js v18 or higher installed on your machine
- Your favorite code editor
What is Electron?
Electron is a framework that enables the development of cross-platform desktop applications with native integration to the underlying operating system. It consists of two main components: an embedded Node.js process (main process) and an embedded Chromium browser process (renderer process). This allows frontend web developers to use existing web application code, tools, and skills to develop desktop applications that feel like native applications.
What is Vite?
Vite is a frontend web development tool that improves the frontend development experience. It replaces and enhances capabilities provided by other commonly used web development tools like react-scripts (based on webpack), Rollup, or Parcel. Vite differentiates itself with its speed when running a local server at development time. It splits your application into dependencies (i.e., node_modules) and source code, resulting in an extremely fast build process.
Why Do We Need electron-vite?
electron-vite brings Vite capabilities to Electron app development, using Vite at its core to build and serve web applications running in the Electron-embedded Chromium browser (renderer process). It extends some of Vite’s best features to improve the development experience for Electron application code, including hot reloading, sensible default configuration, asset handling, and more.
Building a Simple Electron App with React and electron-vite
Let’s build a simple image filter desktop app that can open local image files and apply filters to them. We’ll use Vite with the React template to generate starter code, and then convert our web app into an Electron desktop app built with electron-vite.
Creating a Web App with Vite and React
We’ll start by creating a web app that we’ll eventually run within Electron’s embedded browser. We’ll use Vite with the React template to generate starter code, install some npm packages to help build the user interface and implement the image filter capability, and start the Vite dev server.
Converting to an Electron App
Next, we’ll convert our web app into an Electron desktop app built with electron-vite. We’ll install the Electron and electron-vite packages as dev dependencies, update the scripts in the package.json file, and restructure the source code files and folders in the project.
Adding Native Integration
We’ll use Electron’s native integrations to connect the open image button in the web app to a native file selection dialog provided by the underlying operating system. This will allow the web app to open files directly on the user’s local file system.
Experiencing the Hot Reload
Finally, we’ll experience the electron-vite hot reload by making changes to our app and seeing them reflected in the embedded browser nearly instantaneously.
Considering Life Without electron-vite
Without electron-vite, the developer experience would degrade significantly, requiring manual app restarts for changes to the Electron main or preload scripts. electron-vite brings the fast, developer-friendly experience that developers have come to expect from Vite, plus several other Electron-specific features.
Get Started with electron-vite Today!
If you value your time, use electron-vite to unlock the full potential of Electron app development. The full source code for the image filter app demonstrated in this tutorial is available on GitHub.