electron-serve

Static file serving for Electron apps

Normally you would just use win.loadURL('file://…'), but that doesn't work when you're making a single-page web app, which most Electron apps are today, as history.pushState()'ed URLs don't exist on disk. It serves files if they exist, and falls back to index.html if not, which means you can use router modules like react-router, vue-router, etc.

Install

npm install electron-serve

Requires Electron 8 or later.

Usage

const {app, BrowserWindow} = require('electron');
const serve = require('electron-serve');

const loadURL = serve({directory: 'renderer'});

let mainWindow;

(async () => {
    await app.whenReady();

    mainWindow = new BrowserWindow();

    await loadURL(mainWindow);

    // Or optionally with search parameters.
    await loadURL(mainWindow, {id: 4, foo: 'bar'});

    // The above is equivalent to this:
    await mainWindow.loadURL('app://-');
    // The `-` is just the required hostname
})();

API

loadUrl = serve(options)

options

Type: object

directory

Required
Type: string

The directory to serve, relative to the app root directory.

scheme

Type: string
Default: 'app'

Custom scheme. For example, foo results in your directory being available at foo://-.

hostname

Type: string
Default: '-'

Custom hostname.

file

Type: string
Default: 'index'

Custom HTML filename. This gets appended with '.html'.

isCorsEnabled

Type: boolean
Default: true

Whether CORS should be enabled. Useful for testing purposes.

partition

Type: string
Default: electron.session.defaultSession

The partition where the protocol should be installed, if not using Electron's default partition.

loadUrl(window, searchParameters?)

The serve function returns a loadUrl function, which you use to serve your HTML file in that window.

window

Required
Type: BrowserWindow

The window to load the file in.

searchParameters

Type: object | URLSearchParams

Key value pairs or an URLSearchParams instance to set as the search parameters.

Related

• electron-util - Useful utilities for developing Electron apps and modules
• electron-reloader - Simple auto-reloading for Electron apps during development
• electron-debug - Adds useful debug features to your Electron app
• electron-context-menu - Context menu for your Electron app
• electron-dl - Simplified file downloads for your Electron app
• electron-unhandled - Catch unhandled errors and promise rejections in your Electron app