Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Introduction
Welcome to the Electron documentation! If this is your first time developing an Electron app, read through this Getting Started section to get familiar with the basics. Otherwise, feel free to explore our guides and API documentation!
What is Electron?#
Electron is a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. By embedding Chromium and Node.js into its binary, Electron allows you to maintain one JavaScript codebase and create cross-platform apps that work on Windows, macOS, and Linux — no native development experience required.
Prerequisites#
These docs operate under the assumption that the reader is familiar with both Node.js and general web development. If you need to get more comfortable with either of these areas, we recommend the following resources:
Moreover, you'll have a better time understanding how Electron works if you get acquainted with Chromium's process model. You can get a brief overview of Chrome architecture with the Chrome comic, which was released alongside Chrome's launch back in 2008. Although it's been over a decade since then, the core principles introduced in the comic remain helpful to understand Electron.
Running examples with Electron Fiddle#
Electron Fiddle is a sandbox app written with Electron and supported by Electron's maintainers. We highly recommend installing it as a learning tool to experiment with Electron's APIs or to prototype features during development.
Fiddle also integrates nicely with our documentation. When browsing through examples
in our tutorials, you'll frequently see an "Open in Electron Fiddle" button underneath
a code block. If you have Fiddle installed, this button will open a
fiddle.electronjs.org link that will automatically load the example into Fiddle,
no copy-pasting required.
Getting help#
Are you getting stuck anywhere? Here are a few links to places to look:
- If you need help with developing your app, our community Discord server is a great place to get advice from other Electron app developers.
- If you suspect you're running into a bug with the
electronpackage, please check the GitHub issue tracker to see if any existing issues match your problem. If not, feel free to fill out our bug report template and submit a new issue.