Shared worker working before packing app, but not working after (electron)

Question

I have an electron app where I am trying to push some CPU intensive tasks to a worker thread. This works well when I start the app using npm start, but after packing the app (with electron-packager with --asar) the worker thread appears to stop working. I am loading the worker thread like so:

const workerThread = new SharedWorker(path.join(__dirname, "JS/JS_MainWindow/worker.js"));

I am very confused about what could be causing this, but could it maybe be that the appl is being packaged into an ASAR folder? I am very confident I have the path correct for loading the worker file as I am loading several other images with the sameish path.

Answer 1

My project was also trying to do background/parallel task processing from within an Electron app and we ran into the same issue: the background tasks run fine when run using npm run electron-dev but when a Windows installer is built, the application fails with an error saying it cannot find the module referenced in the worker JS script.

After researching the issue I concluded that Electron runs on a patched version of node that is aware of ASAR archives (Electron's archive format) that makes require() statements with paths work magically both in a packaged/archived environment within ASAR and in a dev environment within your source code.

Because the worker thread runs in a vanilla Node process, and not the patched electron node process, the worker thread cannot resolve the require() statement with a path inside the ASAR archive.

I tried to get our existing code working using the asar-node npm package, but wasn't successful.

Our project is currently trying to use a library called electron-workers to accomplish the same background work task, and we're running into different issues (no performance increase between multiple workers and just running on the main thread).