This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ryosuke
Looking how to use NodeJS modules (like exec to execute CLI commands) or Electron APIs (like dialog to open the native PC’s file dialog to select files)?
The short answer? use the IPC Renderer to create a “pub/sub” event channel between the “main” and “renderer”.
This seems simple enough (if you know Electron buzz words), but there’s not a lot of great examples out there that explicitly show how to do this kind of stuff unless you dig. I had to go through the Electron Discord to find a secret gist that finally had a proper example that worked for me.
ℹ️ I’ll be using electron-react-boilerplate throughout this article as the basis for any code. You can clone this project and follow along - all files I reference will be relative to that project.
Also note - I tried using Electron Forge and it didn’t work out of the box - requiring a lot of configuration to get it on par with electron-react-boilerplate.
My Journey through Webpack Hell
As someone who has built Electron apps before, I thought I knew how to use NodeJS. I literally built an app that the user can input CLI commands and run them (using the exec method in the child_process module). You can see in my project, I use NodeJS directly inside my React component. Normally this wouldn’t be possible - even in NextJS-land you’re forced to use special methods to fetch data from the server-side.
I figured Electron was different from frameworks like NextJS. I was wrong.
When I cloned the latest version of electron-react-boilerplate, I tried doing this again only to get an error about child_process being missing. This led me down a hole of incorrect StackOverflow answers that kept insisting that I do things like add nodeIntegrations: true to my Forge config, changing import to require, or update my Webpack config to null out when importing Node modules in the frontend. None of these worked, and the module would not import, despite any configuration.
This simply emphasized the “renderer” process (or “frontend”) with React didn’t have access to the same modules as the “main” (or “backend”) process. But what does that mean?
How Electron Works
Electron has 2 main processes: Main and Renderer.
A “main” process that runs “server-side” - on the NodeJS platform. This process is responsible for the “backend” of the app, such as rendering the actual app window and piping the HTML inside — or speaking to native platform APIs (like making the actually close using Electron’s app.quit()). Here we can use dependencies such as NodeJS APIs and Electron APIs, as well as any library that requires it to be server-side (like a SQLite adapter to read from a DB — const sqlite = require('sqlite')).
A “renderer” process runs the “frontend” of your app. This includes an HTML page to render, as well as any CSS or JS required inside of it. We can also use libraries like React or Angular, since they’re also JS and render in an HTML page. Here we can use any frontend dependencies that we install in our package.json, like Yup for validating form input (e.g. import yup from 'yup).
Both of these processes are often bundles separately, usually through a library like Webpack or Parcel. The main.js file will run first, then run the renderer.js.
Understanding the distinction between these two will help understand how to create a secure Electron app, similar to working with apps on the web, to avoid exploits like XSS.
How to use Node inside React?
So if you want to do something like query a DB, or open the native file system dialog — how does React run these commands on demand?
The answer is to use IPC in Electron. This is a system that uses pub/sub events to transmit data to and from the “main” (or backend) to the “renderer” (or frontend).
Inside the main process (or main.js), we add a handle() method from IPC Main to “listen” for events (in this case blender:version):
// src/main/main.ts
ipcMain.handle('blender:version', async (_, args) => {
console.log('running cli', _, args)
let result
if (args) {
const blenderExecutable = checkMacBlender(args)
// If MacOS, we need to change path to make executable
const checkVersionCommand = `${blenderExecutable} -v`
result = execSync(checkVersionCommand).toString()
}
return result
})
Also inside the main process, we pass in a preload.js script to load alongside the renderer process. This is included with electron-react-boilerplate:
// src/main/main.ts
webPreferences: {
preload: path.join(__dirname, 'preload.js'),
},
The code inside our preload script will be available to our React code:
// src/main/preload.js
const { contextBridge, ipcRenderer } = require('electron');
contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('electron', {
blenderVersion: async (blenderPath) =>
ipcRenderer.invoke('blender:version', blenderPath),
},
});
What this does is “expose” our object (in this case, methods like blenderVersion()) to the global window under the electron property. This allows us to call window.electron anywhere inside our app’s frontend and find any property/method from the preload script. For example, we’d call window.electron.blenderVersion().
// Inside any React file
const getVersion = async (blenderFile: string): Promise<VersionData> => {
// Use IPC API to query Electron's main thread and run this method
const result = await window.electron.blenderVersion(blenderFile)
}
When we call that method, the IPC Renderer inside the preload script runs (or invoke()) the function we put in the main process. So the frontend uses the “API” you define in preload.js - and the backend uses the event names in preload.js (aka blender:version) to run the right function for the event.
Using this architecture, you can essentially create an API of sorts (similar to API routes in NextJS) to create a secure communication channel between the frontend (renderer aka React) and backend (main process aka Electron/Node).
You can see a full working version of this example in this commit.
Why do all this work?
For security! That’s why.
The problem with frontend code is that the user can edit it and change it.
For example, if we have a shopping cart with products, we’d normally store the product prices in the React state. This is ok, but what if the user changes the price to \$0? Ideally, the request should get handled by a “server” (or separate computer/process the user has no control over) — then the results get passed back to the frontend. This way, we can do things on the server like check the product price and confirm it matches the source of truth (usually a DB).
In Electron, this is similar. We do need to use NodeJS APIs to do actions like accessing the filesystem using fs — but we don’t want the user to be able to access these APIs directly. Dangerous things could happen, like the app could be hijacked and exploited by a 3rd party script. If that malicious script is allowed to run any command, it could delete files on user’s computer (or worse).
You can learn more about security in Electron her*e.*
Adding Typescript support
The only issue with this IPC bridge is that our APIs aren’t explicit to Typescript. They’re passed to the window under the hood by the context bridge, so TS isn’t able to know that window.electron exists.
We can work around this by creating a global Typescript definition file. We can place this anywhere in the frontend project and anytime we add new methods/parameters to IPC bridge (aka window.electron) — we also add the proper types to that file:
import { DialogFileData } from './types';
declare global {
/**
* We define all IPC APIs here to give devs auto-complete
* use window.electron anywhere in app
* Also note the capital "Window" here
*/
interface Window {
electron: {
showDialog: () => Promise<DialogFileData>;
blenderVersion: (blenderFile: string) => Promise<string>;
// Add any additional "APIs" here
};
}
}
// window.electron = window.electron || {};
You can see an example of this file here on Github.
Examples
Open File Dialog
This method when run, opens the native “Open File...” dialog. You’d assign this to a button, then use the filePaths returned as needed.
ipcMain.handle('dialog:open', async (_, args) => {
const result = await dialog.showOpenDialog({ properties: ['openFile'] })
return result
})
Inside the preload.js:
contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('electron', {
showDialog: async () => ipcRenderer.invoke('dialog:open'),
})
Inside React you access the method we exposed using window.electron:
/**
* Returned from the Electron Dialog API `showOpenDialog`
* @see: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/dialog
*/
export type DialogFileData = {
/**
* Did user cancel dialog?
*/
cancelled: boolean
/**
* Array of file paths that user selected
*/
filePaths: string[]
}
const files: DialogFileData = await window.electron.showDialog()
console.log('user files', files)
Create an extra window
One common thing you might encounter when creating an Electron app is the need to create another window, usually something different than the main app (like a setting screen).
Creating a window in Electron is pretty easy. You use the BrowserWindow class to define a new window (like the size or icon), load the HTML file, then have it show using the callback. The beauty of this, we can call it anytime — like on demand when our frontend asks (via IPC):
// src/main/main.ts
// Add this near top of file
const createSecondWindow = (windowUrl = 'index.html') => {
const newWindow = new BrowserWindow({
show: false,
width: 1024,
height: 728,
// icon: getAssetPath('icon.png'),
webPreferences: {
preload: path.join(__dirname, 'preload.js'),
},
})
newWindow.loadURL(resolveHtmlPath(windowUrl))
newWindow.on('ready-to-show', () => {
newWindow.show()
})
}
// Place this where your IPC handles/connects are
ipcMain.handle('new:window', async (_, windowUrl: string) => {
createSecondWindow(windowUrl)
})
Then we create a method on the IPC bridge to connect the frontend (React) to backend (Electron main renderer):
// src/main/preload.js
const { contextBridge, ipcRenderer } = require('electron')
contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('electron', {
newWindow: async (windowUrl) => ipcRenderer.invoke('new:window', windowUrl),
})
And then in React, we can just use:
window.electron.newWindow('second.html')
There’s one problem with this: unless we edit the Webpack config of the project, we only generate 1 HTML file - index.html.
But how do I make another HTML file / React app?
It’s a long process of editing the Webpack configuration for both the production and development renderer, adding new .ts and .ejs entrypoints for the window, and maybe a little extra minor configuration.
We can work around this by passing query parameters instead of a whole new file. At the top level of the React app: we’ll grab the query parameters, parse them, then render a window based on what gets passed. It’ll work kind of like a “router”, with a big switch statement changing between React components that represent each window and it’s content.
So rather than call to a new HTML file, we add a query parameter to index.html file:
window.electron.newWindow('index.html?window=settings')
Then inside our React app, we check for the query parameter using a global variable Electron exposes to browser:
console.log(global.location.search)
// Returns:
// ?window=settings
Then we can parse this using a library like query-string:
import queryString from 'query-string'
const parsed = queryString.parse(global.location.search)
console.log('Window Name', parsed.window)
Using this, inside our App.tsx, we can render different windows:
import queryString from 'query-string'
import React from 'react'
import SettingsWindow from './settings'
import MainWindow from './settings'
const App = () => {
const parsed = queryString.parse(global.location.search)
let route
switch (parsed.window) {
case 'settings':
route = <Settings />
break
default:
route = <MainWindow />
break
}
return route
}
And with the magic of React, you can put a real router (like React Router) inside each window, and each would have it’s own navigation.
References
- ipcMain | Electron
-
dialog | Electron
- Official docs - not really helpful...
-
Dialog Invoke Example
- Great example
- Shoutout to Electron Discord, found it there
-
GitHub - whoisryosuke/blender-hub2 at dialog-example
- Integrated into React
-
Build a Todo App with Electron
- Good breakdown of options for local storage (electron-store vs Node’s
fsfilesystem) - Also shows app folder for each platform (Mac/Win/Linux)
- Good breakdown of options for local storage (electron-store vs Node’s
- How to get Query Parameters in Electron
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ryosuke
Ryosuke | Sciencx (2022-01-17T21:26:52+00:00) Using NodeJS APIs in Electron with React. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/01/17/using-nodejs-apis-in-electron-with-react/
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