Run electron in dev mode

Question

I need to run an electron application in developer mode when I'm running locally and in production mode when the application is built, and I need to read this environment variable during the application.

I am using electron-builder in version 22.8.0 to build the application, and electron is in version 10.0.0.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

If I understand your question, here is what I use to run electron-reload when in development. I think there are other, maybe better ways to do this now, but it has worked really well for me for a few years.

Define a var in the start script:

  "scripts": {
    "start": "APP_DEV=true electron .",
  },

Then read it in main.js:

var isDev = process.env.APP_DEV ? (process.env.APP_DEV.trim() == 'true') : false;

if (isDev) {
    require('electron-reload')(__dirname);
}

Answer 2

From the Electron documentation:

app.isPackaged

A boolean property that returns true if the app is packaged, false otherwise. For many apps, this property can be used to distinguish development and production environments.