安装电子与安装电子生成器

Question

What's the difference between installing electron alone vs via electron-builder? I'm building an Electron app with React and found a few tutorials already. All of them differ how they install Electron, but there is no explanation why.

First :

npx create-react-app app
cd app
npm install electron
npm install --save-dev electron-builder

Second :

create-react-app
npm install --save-dev electron

Third :

create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
yarn add electron --dev
yarn add electron-builder --dev
yarn global add foreman # for process management
yarn install

Two questions:

1. The biggest difference is between First and Second one. In the second tutorial, they didn't even install electron-builder. What's the difference?
2. The second difference is between First and Third: They both installed electron, but one in dev and another not. I'm guessing it should be in --save-dev . Am I correct?

Answer 1

The electron-builder is a library to build a standalone application for platform os. Suppose you want t build a .dmg or .exe for your application, you will need electron-builder . It is a packaging and distribution thing we need after completing the application. For more information, you can visit www.electron.build . You can use electron-builder with minimal configurations as defined in docs.

Answer 2

Answer for Q1 : To packaging the app to installer or executable application whatever you'd like to be. We can use Electron-Builder or Electron-Package which is popular and well-known Electron packaging tool. I'd recommend you to have a look at this How to package the electron app

These 3rd party packaging tools are just for your app distribution. But you can forward manual distribution without using these tools.

The First is the proper way. I think the Second one is the case that is not using 3rd party packaging tools.

Answer for Q2 : Importing as devDependencies or dependencies won't occur any problem.

But speaking strictly, these should be added as devDependencies .

Both Electron and Electron-Builder is just for needing to build and packaging application. And the production app won't require all of these.

By your question. I'm guessing it should be in --save-dev. Am I correct? Yes, exactly