Packaging and Making Distributables

Packaging and making distributables is a simple process. However, please note that to make a package for an OS, you need to be on that OS (excluding Windows zip—if you have Wine and Mono installed, you can build it on Linux or Mac as well).

To make the distributables, just run npm run make. If you're on Linux, you should see something like this, and if not, it will be similar but different targets will be listed:

✔ Checking your system
✔ Resolving Forge Config
We need to package your application before we can make it
✔ Preparing to Package Application for arch: x64
✔ Preparing native dependencies
✔ Packaging Application
Making for the following targets: zip, deb, rpm
✔ Making for target: zip - On platform: linux - For arch: x64
✔ Making for target: deb - On platform: linux - For arch: x64
✔ Making for target: rpm - On platform: linux - For arch: x64

This indicates that everything ran smoothly.

Then, to make the PKGBUILD for pacman distros, download the previous release's PKGBUILD. Simply update the version number under the pkgver variable and it should be good to go.

Making the .zip for Windows on other OSes (requires Mono and Wine)

With npx:

npx @electron-forge/cli make --platforms=win32 --targets=@electron-forge/maker-zip

Without:

node_modules/.bin/electron-forge make --platforms=win32 --targets=@electron-forge/maker-zip

Issue with maker-deb

I've noticed that maker-deb doesn't work, because it complains about the Depends field in the control file. It will include something like this:

'Depends' field, missing package name, or garbage where package name expected

For some reason, one of the values in the Depends field is null or undefined, which breaks dpkg-deb. To fix this, add the following line to node_modules/electron-installer-common/src/template.js after await fs.ensureDir(path.dirname(dest), '0755'):

if (options.depends) options.depends.forEach((element, index) => { if (!element) options.depends.splice(index, 1) })

This just removes any null/undefined values from the options.depends array.

MacOS fails to make the .dmg

Currently we don't offer a .dmg; the configuration is only there if it works in the future. The error can be safely ignored as the .zip was made successfully.