Electron app installed but doesn't appear in start menu

Question

I've created an app using Electron, and bundled it in an .exe file with electron-builder.

When I run the generated executable, the application starts with the default installation GIF used by electron-builder, as expected.

After the GIF finishes, the app restarts and works properly. It even appears in control panel's programs list.

However, if I look for it in the start menu applications, it isn't there (and searching it by its name only returns the aforementioned .exe installer).
Because of this, once the app is closed, the only way to open it back is running again the installer.

Why does this happen? Is there any way to make it appear with the other programs?

Answer 1

The electron-builder installer (and electron-windows-installer) use Squirrel for handling the installation. Squirrel launches your application on install with arguments that you need to handle. An example can be found on the windows installer github docs

Handling Squirrel Events

Squirrel will spawn your app with command line flags on first run, updates, and uninstalls. it is very important that your app handle these events as early as possible, and quit immediately after handling them. Squirrel will give your app a short amount of time (~15sec) to apply these operations and quit.

The electron-squirrel-startup module will handle the most common events for you, such as managing desktop shortcuts. Just add the following to the top of your main.js and you're good to go:

if (require('electron-squirrel-startup')) return;

You should handle these events in your app's main entry point with something such as:

const app = require('app');

// this should be placed at top of main.js to handle setup events quickly
if (handleSquirrelEvent()) {
  // squirrel event handled and app will exit in 1000ms, so don't do anything else
  return;
}

function handleSquirrelEvent() {
  if (process.argv.length === 1) {
    return false;
  }

  const ChildProcess = require('child_process');
  const path = require('path');

  const appFolder = path.resolve(process.execPath, '..');
  const rootAtomFolder = path.resolve(appFolder, '..');
  const updateDotExe = path.resolve(path.join(rootAtomFolder, 'Update.exe'));
  const exeName = path.basename(process.execPath);

  const spawn = function(command, args) {
    let spawnedProcess, error;

    try {
      spawnedProcess = ChildProcess.spawn(command, args, {detached: true});
    } catch (error) {}

    return spawnedProcess;
  };

  const spawnUpdate = function(args) {
    return spawn(updateDotExe, args);
  };

  const squirrelEvent = process.argv[1];
  switch (squirrelEvent) {
    case '--squirrel-install':
    case '--squirrel-updated':
      // Optionally do things such as:
      // - Add your .exe to the PATH
      // - Write to the registry for things like file associations and
      //   explorer context menus

      // Install desktop and start menu shortcuts
      spawnUpdate(['--createShortcut', exeName]);

      setTimeout(app.quit, 1000);
      return true;

    case '--squirrel-uninstall':
      // Undo anything you did in the --squirrel-install and
      // --squirrel-updated handlers

      // Remove desktop and start menu shortcuts
      spawnUpdate(['--removeShortcut', exeName]);

      setTimeout(app.quit, 1000);
      return true;

    case '--squirrel-obsolete':
      // This is called on the outgoing version of your app before
      // we update to the new version - it's the opposite of
      // --squirrel-updated

      app.quit();
      return true;
  }
};

Notice that the first time the installer launches your app, your app will see a --squirrel-firstrun flag. This allows you to do things like showing up a splash screen or presenting a settings UI. Another thing to be aware of is that, since the app is spawned by squirrel and squirrel acquires a file lock during installation, you won't be able to successfully check for app updates till a few seconds later when squirrel releases the lock.

In this example you can see it run Update.exe (a squirrel executable) with the argument --create-shortcut that adds start menu and desktop shortcuts.