Using Express inside Atom Electron

Question

I have an application running Express, and I am trying to distribute it using electron.

Running electron in debug with this:

/path/to/electron/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron path-to-my-app

My application runs perfectly fine. Express fires up its server and everything works -- the main window opens correctly using mainWindow.loadUrl('http://localhost:3000/');

When I follow the distribution tutorial (linked before) I copy my application resources to:

/path/to/electron/Electron.app/Contents/Resources/app

But now when I run Electron.app, I see Cannot GET / in the main window... but I have no idea why.

Any ideas?

My only thought is that process.cwd() is not correctly helping me define the document root here:

//configure Express to default web requests to /workspace/ folder
expressApp.use(express.static(process.cwd() + '/workspace'));

But if that's the case, I don't know how to get around it.

Answer 1

It turns out that express for some reason didn't like my document root mapping.

Rather than using:

//configure Express to default web requests to /workspace/ folder
expressApp.use(express.static(process.cwd() + '/workspace'));

I instead use this:

expressApp.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'workspace')));

Answer 2

Don't use process.cwd, use process.resourcesPath instead.