How to port an existing angular app to electron?

Question

I am a beginner to angular and a complete noob to electron. I was wondering if it would be possible to port an existing angular app to electron by using most of the existing codebase of the webapp?

I found a couple of links on this but not much on Google. Most results talk about starting with angular and electron to create a desktop app - which is my intention but I would like to use most of my existing code base and ideally just add webpack and electron related config to compile the electon app from existing codebase as I don't want to maintain two version of the same codebase.

I could use this bridge to access Electron API (although I am not sure how it will all hang together) https://github.com/develephant/ngElectron

What do usually people do?

Answer 1

Here are the steps I took to add Electron to an existing AngularJS app.
1. Clone an existing Angular app git clone https://github.com/angular/angular-seed.git.
2. cd angular-seed.
3. npm install --save electron.
4. In /app, create a main.js file and paste:

const electron = require('electron')
// Module to control application life.
const app = electron.app
// Module to create native browser window.
const BrowserWindow = electron.BrowserWindow

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
let mainWindow

function createWindow () {
  // Create the browser window.
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, height: 600})

  // and load the index.html of the app.
  mainWindow.loadURL(`file://${__dirname}/index.html`)

  // Open the DevTools.
  //mainWindow.webContents.openDevTools()

  // Emitted when the window is closed.
  mainWindow.on('closed', function () {
    // Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
    // in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
    // when you should delete the corresponding element.
    mainWindow = null
  })
}

// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
// Some APIs can only be used after this event occurs.
app.on('ready', createWindow)

// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', function () {
  // On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
  // to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
  if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
    app.quit()
  }
})

app.on('activate', function () {
  // On OS X it's common to re-create a window in the app when the
  // dock icon is clicked and there are no other windows open.
  if (mainWindow === null) {
    createWindow()
  }
})

// In this file you can include the rest of your app's specific main process
// code. You can also put them in separate files and require them here.

5. In /app, create a blank renderer.js file.
   
6. In root of package.json add "main": "main.js".
   
7. In "scripts" section of package.json change "start" to "start": "electron .".
   
8. npm install && npm start.