Building a Release

In order to run outside of the development environment you need to build a release version, which builds an 'executable' as well as installers appropriate for your platform. (Windows: NSIS installer, macOS: DMG image, Linux: Debian package)

To do this, run the following command:

make build

If you do not want to re-compile your code you can split the command into building the JavaScript source and application packaging.

# Creating the JS bundles, CSS files, ...
make build-main [CONFIG_ENV]

# Package the App
make package

Notes:

make build will by default only create a distributable package for your current host system.
All packages are saved to the ./release directory.
We are using CircleCI for creating release builds. For advanced configuration use cases please check the .circleci/config.yml

Customizing the build

Desktop Configs

In desktop-config you can find various configurations for building the app. The most used configurations are release and development.

To use a specific configuration, run:

make build CONFIG_ENV=...

By default, we fall back to base if no configuration is specified.

Platform Requirements

Mac

A Mac build requires the app to be signed. This prevents a security warning being issued when you run the app. It is also a requirement of the auto-updater feature.

You can obtain all the appropriate signing certificates from an Apple Developer account.

Note that you need the certificates installed prior to building.

Windows

Refer to Windows environment requires in the development docs.

Linux

To build on Linux, you need the following libraries in order to be able to manually re-build native dependencies:

apt-get install -y libsecret-1-devdev