在使用电子构建器安装应用程序的同时向用户环境添加命令行脚本

Question

I'm currently working on a project with Electron 9.0.4 and Electron-Builder 22.8.0 and am faced with a problem that doesn't seem too difficult but there isn't a valid solution online! (At least I couldn't find it)

I have my main program that does all of the UI tasks, and a command line script that does some backend. The reason I have this command line script is so that I can run certain parts of the application without opening the window itself. Everything works fine on my computer. After running npm link , my CL script is added to my environment variables and I can just run it from the console. However, when I try to build with electron-builder , the problem occurs.

If I use my Setup.exe on another computer, the command line script just won't be added to the environment variables and I couldn't find instructions on how to do this in the electron , nodejs , or electron-builder documentation. What I found was a suggestion on another question to add npm -g install as a post-install script, but that had no effect either.

Someone else suggested adding npm link as a post-installation script, but firstly if I am not mistaken this function is not intended for production and secondly it created an infinite loop as npm link triggered the post-installation script over and over again.

Thats how the script is added to the project

"bin": {
    "command-name": "/cl.js"
  }

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Since I couldn't find a direct solution to my problem and didn't want to look any further for a solution while being able to take a different approach.

I decided to take a step back and look for another method to solve my problem I came to the conclusion that I didn't really need to add a script to the command line. My solution was to look for a certain argument when starting the regular application.

if (process.argv.includes("cli")) {  /* Do commandline stuff */ }

When the custom argument is found, I simply run the script that should've been run from the command line. Using this approach, you can create a shortcut to my executable that contains the custom argument and then instead of the application it runs the command line script.