electron-require

Simplified require in electron applications

electron-require is a super basic, no dependency convenience wrapper around require for your electron applications. You can use it to avoid using complex require paths in your application.

Installation

$ npm install --save electron-require

Then include it in your code:

const rq = require('electron-require');

Usage

rq()

rq('./module.js') imports module.js from the current process directory (it is actually an alias to require.main.require('./module.js')).

rq.electron()

rq.electron('module') is the same than require('electron')['module'], except that it resolves into require('electron').remote['module'] when module is not found, if used in the renderer process.

rq.remote()

rq.remote('module') is the same than require('electron').remote.require('module'), except that it resolves into rq.main('module') when used in the main process.

Aliases

You can add your own custom alias with rq.set(key, path).

Once rq.set('myAlias', 'my/path') is called, rq.myAlias('./module.js') will try to load my/path/module.js.

Example 1:

rq.set('local', 'local');

// Import [application root]/local/my-local-module.js into myLocalModule
const myLocalModule = rq.local('./my-local-module.js');

Example 2:

let userData = electron.app.getPath('userData');
rq.set('plugin', userData + '/plugins');

// Import [userdata]/plugins/my-plugin.js into myPlugin
const myPlugin = rq.plugin('/my-plugin.js');

Template strings

You can use template string in the path passed to .set():

• %{app} resolves to app.getAppPath()
• %{anyOtherName} resolves to app.getPath('anyOtherName')

So we can write example 2 in a simpler way:

rq.set('plugin', '%{userData}/plugins');

// Import [userdata]/plugins/my-plugin.js into myPlugin
const myPlugin = rq.plugin('/my-plugin.js');

Read more about this in the app module documentation

Multiple alias

rq.set can also be used with an object:

rq.set({
	'local': 'local',
    'plugin': '%{userData}/plugins'
});

Custom aliases defined in package.json

In most cases you will want to use the same custom aliases for the whole project. You can define custom aliases by adding an electron-require key to your app package.json file:

"electron-require": {
    "first": "path/to/first/alias",
	"second": "path/to/second/alias"
}

Default aliases

Default aliases are the following:

{
    "root": "",
    "renderer": "app/renderer",
    "main": "app/main",
    "browser": "app/main"
}

It actually assumes that your app is organized in the following way:

.
├── app
│   ├── main
│   │   └── [main process modules]
│   └── renderer
│       └── [renderer process modules]
└── package.json

But you can of course override theses default values by using rq.set() or by adding an electron-require entry in your package.json.

License

The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Thomas Brouard