Electron is not defined

Question

I'm using the boilerplate react-photonkit/epp and everything is well executed on dev when running yarn start.

But then, when I want to package my app with yarn run build-osx, the app is generated but I have an error when launching it. This error appears only when I try to import electron. If not, the app is running in production.

Uncaught ReferenceError: electron is not defined

Here is my webpack config, the only thing I have added is target:"electron". I also tried with externals: {electron: "electron"}.

I tried to import dialog from electron like this:

const {dialog} = require('electron').remote;

Or

const {dialog} = window.require('electron').remote;

Answer 1

I managed to require the dialog modifying the target in the webpack config target:electron-renderer which import the module remote.

Then we can import it like this

const remote = window.require("electron").remote;
const dialog = remote.require('dialog');

And the I can use the dialog from electron. It's a workaround, I didn't figured out why electron was not available but it could be because of the really old version of electron and the electron-packager. This repo has not been updated for a while and the version were not fixed so it can create issue.

Anyway, for people trying this boilerplate, start with electron forge and electron-compile!