sending console JS commands to an Electron app

Question

I'm looking to automate an existing Electron app. It gives access to the Developer Tools, so I could just paste Javascript code into the console, but there must be a way to do this remotely, ideally using Node or from the Terminal?

I've seen this option for running Chrome : --remote-debugging-port=9222 ... that hints at a solution but I can't seem to get closer.

Answer 1

If you launch your Electron app with --remote-debugging-port=9222 then you will enable remote debugging via Chrome DevTools protocol. You can use a Chrome developer tools instance as a client, or use one of the clients here: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/awesome-chrome-devtools#chrome-devtools-protocol

The debuggable Chrome instance will be running on localhost:9222 . Which means as long as you are trying to debug from the same machine you are fine. However if you want to debug from a remote machine you need some additional setup.

Setup an SSH tunnel on the source machine:

ssh -L 0.0.0.0:9223:localhost:9222 localhost -N

This will accept incoming traffic on the 9223 port and route it to Chrome remote debugging.

Then on your client machine use the address: source-machine-ip:9223 to access the remote debugging.

Note: This may not work on Windows without additional SSH setup as SSH is not prepackaged with Windows.