The Electron website has a new search engine that delivers instant results for API docs, tutorials, Electron-related npm packages, and more.

Learning a new technology or framework like Electron can be intimidating. Once you get past the quick-start phase, it can be difficult to learn best practices, find the right APIs, or discover the tools that will help you build the app of your dreams. We want the Electron website to be a better tool for finding the resources you need to build apps faster and more easily.

Visit any page on electronjs.org and you'll find the new search input at the top of the page.

The Search Engine​

When we first set about adding search to the website, we rolled our own search engine using GraphQL as a backend. GraphQL was fun to work with and the search engine was performant, but we quickly realized that building a search engine is not a trivial task. Things like multi-word search and typo detection require a lot of work to get right. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we decided to use an existing search solution: Algolia.

Algolia is a hosted search service that has quickly become the search engine of choice among popular open source projects like React, Vue, Bootstrap, Yarn, and many others.

Here are some of the features that made Algolia a good fit for the Electron project:

• InstantSearch.js provides results as you type, usually in about 1ms.
• Typo tolerance means you'll still get results even when you type widnow.
• Advanced query syntax enables "exact quoted matches" and -exclusion.
• API clients are open source and with well-documented.
• Analytics tell us what people are searching for most, as well as what they're searching for but not finding. This will give us valuable insight into how Electron's documentation can be improved.
• Algolia is free for open source projects.

API Docs​

Sometimes you know what you want to accomplish, but you don't know exactly how to do it. Electron has over 750 API methods, events, and properties. No human can easily remember all of them, but computers are good at this stuff. Using Electron's JSON API docs, we indexed all of this data in Algolia, and now you can easily find the exact API you're looking for.

Trying to resize a window? Search for resize and jump straight to the method you need.

Tutorials​

Electron has an ever-growing collection of tutorials to complement its API documentation. Now you can more easily find tutorials on a given topic, right alongside related API documentation.

Looking for security best practices? Search for security.

npm Packages​

There are now over 700,000 packages in the npm registry and it's not always easy to find the one you need. To make it easier to discover these modules, we've created electron-npm-packages, a collection of the 3400+ modules in the registry that are built specifically for use with Electron.

The folks at Libraries.io have created SourceRank, a system for scoring software projects based on a combination of metrics like code, community, documentation, and usage. We created a sourceranks module that includes the score of every module in the npm registry, and we use these scores to sort the package results.

Want alternatives to Electron's built-in IPC modules? Search for is:package ipc.

Electron Apps​

It's easy to index data with Algolia, so we added the existing apps list from electron/apps.

Try a search for music or homebrew.

Filtering Results​

If you've used GitHub's code search before, you're probably aware of its colon-separated key-value filters like extension:js or user:defunkt. We think this filtering technique is pretty powerful, so we've added an is: keyword to Electron's search that lets you filter results to only show a single type:

• is:api thumbnail
• is:tutorial security
• is:package ipc
• is:app graphql

Keyboard Navigation​

People love keyboard shortcuts! The new search can be used without taking your fingers off the keyboard:

• / focuses the search input
• esc focuses the search input and clears it
• down moves to the next result
• up moves to the previous result, or the search input
• enter opens a result

We also open-sourced the module that enables this keyboard interaction. It's designed for use with Algolia InstantSearch, but is generalized to enable compatibility with different search implementations.

We want your feedback​

If you encounter any issues with the new search tool, we want to hear about it!

The best way to submit your feedback is by filing an issue on GitHub in the appropriate repository:

• electron/electronjs.org is the Electron website. If you don't know where to file an issue, this your best bet.
• electron/algolia-indices is where all the searchable Electron data is compiled.
• electron/search-with-your-keyboard makes the search interface navigable by keyboard.
• algolia/instantsearch.js is the browser-side client that enables find-as-you-type search.
• algolia/algoliasearch-client-javascript is the Node.js client for uploading data to Algolia's servers.

Thanks​

Special thanks to Emily Jordan and Vanessa Yuen for building these new search capabilities, to Libraries.io for providing SourceRank scores, and to the team at Algolia for helping us get started. 🍹

Ever since the launch of the new internationalized Electron website, we have been working hard to make the Electron development experience even more accessible to developers outside of the English speaking world.

So here we are with some exciting i18n updates!

🌐 Language Toggle​

Did you know that many people who read translated documentation often cross reference that with the original English documentation? They do this to familiarize themselves with English docs, and to avoid outdated or inaccurate translations, which is one caveat of internationalized documentations.

To make cross-referencing to English docs easier, we recently shipped a feature that allows you to seamlessly toggle a section of the Electron documentation between English and whatever language you're viewing the website in. The language toggle will show up as long as you have a non-English locale selected on the website.

⚡️ Quick Access to Translation Page​

Notice a typo or an incorrect translation while you're reading the documentation? You no longer have to log in to Crowdin, pick your locale, find the file you'd like the fix, etc etc. Instead, you can just scroll down to the bottom of the said doc, and click "Translate this doc" (or the equivalent in your language). Voila! You are brought straight to the Crowdin translation page. Now apply your translation magic!

📈 Some Statistics​

Ever since we have publicized the Electron documentation i18n effort, we have seen huge growth in translation contributions from Electron community members from all around the world. To date, we have 1,719,029 strings translated, from 1,066 community translators, and in 25 languages.

Here is a fun graph showing the approximate amount of time needed to translate the project into each language if the existing tempo (based on the project activity during the last 14 days at the time of writing) is preserved.

📃 Translator Survey​

We would like to give a huge ❤️ thank you ❤️ to everyone who has contributed their time to help improving Electron! In order to properly acknowledge the hard work of our translator community, we have created a survey to collect some information (namely the mapping between their Crowdin and Github usernames) about our translators.

If you are one of our incredible translators, please take a few minutes to fill this out: https://goo.gl/forms/b46sjdcHmlpV0GKT2.

🙌 Node's Internationalization Effort​

Because of the success of Electron's i18n initiative, Node.js decided to model their revamped i18n effort after the pattern we use as well! 🎉 The Node.js i18n initiative has now been launched and gained great momentum, but you can stil read about the early proposal and reasoning behind it here.

🔦 Contributing Guide​

If you're interested in joining our effort to make Electron more international friendly, we have a handy-dandy contributing guide to help you get started. Happy internationalizing! 📚

After more than four months of development, eight beta releases, and worldwide testing from many apps' staged rollouts, the release of Electron 2.0.0 is now available from electronjs.org.

Release Process​

Starting with 2.0.0, Electron's releases will follow semantic versioning. This means the major version will bump more often and will usually be a major update to Chromium. Patch releases should be more stable because they will contain only high-priority bug fixes.

Electron 2.0.0 also represents an improvement to how Electron is stabilized before a major release. Several large scale Electron apps have included 2.0.0 betas in staged rollouts, providing the best feedback loop Electron's ever had for a beta series.

Changes / New Features​

• Major bumps to several important parts of Electron's toolchain, including Chrome 61, Node 8.9.3, V8 6.1.534.41, GTK+ 3 on Linux, updated spellchecker, and Squirrel.
• In-app purchases are now supported on MacOS. #11292
• New API for loading files. #11565
• New API to enable/disable a window. #11832
• New API app.setLocale(). #11469
• New support for logging IPC messages. #11880
• New menu events. #11754
• Add a shutdown event to powerMonitor. #11417
• Add affinity option for gathering several BrowserWindows into a single process. #11501
• Add the ability for saveDialog to list available extensions. #11873
• Support for additional notification actions #11647
• The ability to set macOS notification close button title. #11654
• Add conditional for menu.popup(window, callback)
• Memory improvements in touchbar items. #12527
• Improved security recommendation checklist.
• Add App-Scoped Security scoped bookmarks. #11711
• Add ability to set arbitrary arguments in a renderer process. #11850
• Add accessory view for format picker. #11873
• Fixed network delegate race condition. #12053
• Drop support for the mips64el arch on Linux. Electron requires the C++14 toolchain, which was not available for that arch at the time of the release. We hope to re-add support in the future.

Breaking API changes​

• Removed deprecated APIs, including:
  • Changed menu.popup signature. #11968
  • Removed deprecated crashReporter.setExtraParameter #11972
  • Removed deprecated webContents.setZoomLevelLimits and webFrame.setZoomLevelLimits. #11974
  • Removed deprecated clipboard methods. #11973
  • Removed support for boolean parameters for tray.setHighlightMode. #11981

Bug Fixes​

• Changed to make sure webContents.isOffscreen() is always available. #12531
• Fixed BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow() when DevTools is undocked and focused. #12554
• Fixed preload not loading in sandboxed render if preload path contains special chars. #12643
• Correct the default of allowRunningInsecureContent as per docs. #12629
• Fixed transparency on nativeImage. #12683
• Fixed issue with Menu.buildFromTemplate. #12703
• Confirmed menu.popup options are objects. #12330
• Removed a race condition between new process creation and context release. #12361
• Update draggable regions when changing BrowserView. #12370
• Fixed menubar toggle alt key detection on focus. #12235
• Fixed incorrect warnings in webviews. #12236
• Fixed inheritance of 'show' option from parent windows. #122444
• Ensure that getLastCrashReport() is actually the last crash report. #12255
• Fixed require on network share path. #12287
• Fixed context menu click callback. #12170
• Fixed popup menu position. #12181
• Improved libuv loop cleanup. #11465
• Fixed hexColorDWORDToRGBA for transparent colors. #11557
• Fixed null pointer dereference with getWebPreferences api. #12245
• Fixed a cyclic reference in menu delegate. #11967
• Fixed protocol filtering of net.request. #11657
• WebFrame.setVisualZoomLevelLimits now sets user-agent scale constraints #12510
• Set appropriate defaults for webview options. #12292
• Improved vibrancy support. #12157 #12171 #11886
• Fixed timing issue in singleton fixture.
• Fixed broken production cache in NotifierSupportsActions()
• Made MenuItem roles camelCase-compatible. #11532
• Improved touch bar updates. #11812, #11761.
• Removed extra menu separators. #11827
• Fixed Bluetooth chooser bug. Closes #11399.
• Fixed macos Full Screen Toggle menu item label. #11633
• Improved tooltip hiding when a window is deactivated. #11644
• Migrated deprecated web-view method. #11798
• Fixed closing a window opened from a browserview. #11799
• Fixed Bluetooth chooser bug. #11492
• Updated to use task scheduler for app.getFileIcon API. #11595
• Changed to fire console-message event even when rendering offscreen. #11921
• Fixed downloading from custom protocols using WebContents.downloadURL. #11804
• Fixed transparent windows losing transparency when devtools detaches. #11956
• Fixed Electron apps canceling restart or shutdown. #11625

macOS​

• Fixed event leak on reuse of touchbar item. #12624
• Fixed tray highlight in darkmode. #12398
• Fixed blocking main process for async dialog. #12407
• Fixed setTitle tray crash. #12356
• Fixed crash when setting dock menu. #12087

Linux​

• Better Linux desktop notifications. #12229 #12216 #11965 #11980
• Better GTK+ theme support for menus. #12331
• Exit gracefully on linux. #12139
• Use the app’s name as the tray icon's default tooltip. #12393

Windows​

• Added Visual Studio 2017 support. #11656
• Fixed passing of exception to the system crash handler. #12259
• Fixed hiding tooltip from minimized window. #11644
• Fixed desktopCapturer to capture the correct screen. #11664
• Fixed disableHardwareAcceleration with transparency. #11704

What's Next

The Electron team is hard at work to support newer versions of Chromium, Node, and v8. Expect 3.0.0-beta.1 soon!

Today we're releasing a free, open-source, hosted updates webservice and companion npm package to enable easy automatic updates for open-source Electron apps. This is a step toward empowering app developers to think less about deployment and more about developing high-quality experiences for their users.

Making life easier​

Electron has an autoUpdater API that gives apps the ability to consume metadata from a remote endpoint to check for updates, download them in the background, and install them automatically.

Enabling these updates has been a cumbersome step in the deployment process for many Electron app developers because it requires a web server to be deployed and maintained just to serve app version history metadata.

Today we are announcing a new drop-in solution for automatic app updates. If your Electron app is in a public GitHub repository and you're using GitHub Releases to publish builds, you can use this service to deliver continuous app updates to your users.

Using the new module​

To minimize configuration on your part, we've created update-electron-app, an npm module which integrates with the new update.electronjs.org webservice.

Install the module:

npm install update-electron-app

Call it from anywhere in your app's main process:

require('update-electron-app')();

That's it! The module will check for updates at app startup, then every ten minutes. When an update is found it will download automatically in the background, and a dialog will be displayed when the update is ready.

Migrating existing apps​

Apps already using Electron's autoUpdater API can use this service too. To do so, you can customize the update-electron-app module or integrate directly with update.electronjs.org.

Alternatives​

If you're using electron-builder to package your app, you can use its built-in updater. For details, see electron.build/auto-update.

If your app is private, you may need to run your own update server. There are a number of open-source tools for this, including Zeit's Hazel and Atlassian's Nucleus. See the Deploying an Update Server tutorial for more info.

Thanks​

Thanks to Julian Gruber for helping design and build this simple and scalable web service. Thanks to the folks at Zeit for their open-source Hazel service, from which we drew design inspiration. Thanks to Samuel Attard for the code reviews. Thanks to the Electron community for helping test this service.

🌲 Here's to an evergreen future for Electron apps!

The new Electron 2.0 release line is packed with new features and fixes. One of the highlights from this new major version is a new inAppPurchase API for Apple's Mac App Store.

In-app purchases enable content or subscriptions to be purchased directly from within apps. This gives developers an easy way to embrace the freemium business model, wherein users pay nothing to download an app and are offered optional in-app purchases for premium features, additional content, or subscriptions.

The new API was added to Electron by community contributor Adrien Fery to enable in-app purchases in Amanote, a note-taking Electron app for lectures and conferences. Amanote is free to download and allows clear and structured notes to be added to PDFs, with features like mathematical formulae, drawings, audio recording, and more.

Since adding in-app purchase support to the Mac version of Amanote, Adrien has noted a 40% increase in sales!

Getting Started​

The new inAppPurchase API has already landed in the latest Electron beta:

npm i -D electron@beta

The docs for the API can be found on GitHub, and Adrien has been kind enough to write a tutorial on how to use the API. To get started adding in-app purchases to your app, see the tutorial.

More improvements to the API are in the works, and will soon be landing in an upcoming Electron beta release.

Windows Could Be Next​

Up next, Adrien is hoping to open a new revenue channel for Amanote by adding support for Microsoft Store in-app purchases in Electron. Stay tuned for developments on that!

A vulnerability has been discovered which allows Node.js integration to be re-enabled in some Electron applications that disable it. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2018-1000136.

Affected Applications​

An application is affected if all of the following are true:

1. Runs on Electron 1.7, 1.8, or a 2.0.0-beta
2. Allows execution of arbitrary remote code
3. Disables Node.js integration
4. Does not explicitly declare webviewTag: false in its webPreferences
5. Does not enable the nativeWindowOption option
6. Does not intercept new-window events and manually override event.newGuest without using the supplied options tag

Although this appears to be a minority of Electron applicatons, we encourage all applications to be upgraded as a precaution.

Mitigation​

This vulnerability is fixed in today's 1.7.13, 1.8.4, and 2.0.0-beta.5 releases.

Developers who are unable to upgrade their application's Electron version can mitigate the vulnerability with the following code:

app.on('web-contents-created', (event, win) => {
  win.on(
    'new-window',
    (event, newURL, frameName, disposition, options, additionalFeatures) => {
      if (!options.webPreferences) options.webPreferences = {};
      options.webPreferences.nodeIntegration = false;
      options.webPreferences.nodeIntegrationInWorker = false;
      options.webPreferences.webviewTag = false;
      delete options.webPreferences.preload;
    }
  );
});

// and *IF* you don't use WebViews at all,
// you might also want
app.on('web-contents-created', (event, win) => {
  win.on('will-attach-webview', (event, webPreferences, params) => {
    event.preventDefault();
  });
});

Further Information​

This vulnerability was found and reported responsibly to the Electron project by Brendan Scarvell of Trustwave SpiderLabs.

To learn more about best practices for keeping your Electron apps secure, see our security tutorial.

To report a vulnerability in Electron, please email security@electronjs.org.

Please join our email list to receive updates about releases and security updates.

Last week the electronjs.org site had a few minutes of downtime. If you were affected by these brief outages, we're sorry for the inconvenience. After a bit of investigation today, we've diagnosed the root cause and have deployed a fix.

To prevent this kind of downtime in the future, we've enabled Heroku threshold alerts on our app. Any time our web server accumulates failed requests or slow responses beyond a certain threshold, our team will be notified so we can address the problem quickly.

Offline Docs in Every Language​

The next time you're developing an Electron app on a plane or in a subterranean coffee shop, you might want to have a copy of the docs for offline reference. Fortunately, Electron's docs are available as Markdown files in over 20 languages.

git clone https://github.com/electron/electron-i18n
ls electron-i18n/content

Offline Docs with a GUI​

devdocs.io/electron is a handy website that stores docs for offline use, not just for Electron but many other projects like JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Angular, and many others. And of course there's an Electron app for that, too. Check out devdocs-app on the Electron site.

If you like to install apps without using your mouse or trackpad, give Electron Forge's install command a try:

npx electron-forge install egoist/devdocs-app

A remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered affecting Electron apps that use custom protocol handlers. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2018-1000006.

Affected Platforms​

Electron apps designed to run on Windows that register themselves as the default handler for a protocol, like myapp://, are vulnerable.

Such apps can be affected regardless of how the protocol is registered, e.g. using native code, the Windows registry, or Electron's app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient API.

macOS and Linux are not vulnerable to this issue.

Mitigation​

We've published new versions of Electron which include fixes for this vulnerability: 1.8.2-beta.5, 1.7.12, and 1.6.17. We urge all Electron developers to update their apps to the latest stable version immediately.

If for some reason you are unable to upgrade your Electron version, you can append -- as the last argument when calling app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient, which prevents Chromium from parsing further options. The double dash -- signifies the end of command options, after which only positional parameters are accepted.

app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient(protocol, process.execPath, [
  '--your-switches-here',
  '--',
]);

See the app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient API for more details.

To learn more about best practices for keeping your Electron apps secure, see our security tutorial.

If you wish to report a vulnerability in Electron, email security@electronjs.org.

A new major version of Electron is in the works, and with it some changes to our versioning strategy. As of version 2.0.0, Electron will strictly adhere to Semantic Versioning.

This change means you'll see the major version bump more often, and it will usually be a major update to Chromium. Patch releases will also be more stable, as they will now only contain bug fixes with no new features.

Major Version Increments

• Chromium version updates
• Node.js major version updates
• Electron breaking API changes

Minor Version Increments

• Node.js minor version updates
• Electron non-breaking API changes

Patch Version Increments

• Node.js patch version updates
• fix-related chromium patches
• Electron bug fixes

Because Electron's semver ranges will now be more meaningful, we recommend installing Electron using npm's default --save-dev flag, which will prefix your version with ^, keeping you safely up to date with minor and patch updates:

npm install --save-dev electron

For developers interested only in bug fixes, you should use the tilde semver prefix e.g. ~2.0.0, which which will never introduce new features, only fixes to improve stability.

For more details, see electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/electron-versioning.

Electron has a new website at electronjs.org! We've replaced our static Jekyll site with a Node.js webserver, giving us flexibility to internationalize the site and paving the way for more exciting new features.

🌍 Translations​

We've begun the process of internationalizing the website with the goal of making Electron app development accessible to a global audience of developers. We're using a localization platform called Crowdin that integrates with GitHub, opening and updating pull requests automatically as content is translated into different languages.

Though we've been working quietly on this effort so far, over 75 Electron community members have already discovered the project organically and joined in the effort to internationalize the website and translate Electron's docs into over 20 languages. We are seeing daily contributions from people all over the world, with translations for languages like French, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Chinese leading the way.

To choose your language and view translation progress, visit electronjs.org/languages

If you're multilingual and interested in helping translate Electron's docs and website, visit the electron/electron-i18n repo, or jump right into translating on Crowdin, where you can sign in using your GitHub account.

There are currently 21 languages enabled for the Electron project on Crowdin. Adding support for more languages is easy, so if you're interested in helping translate but you don't see your language listed, let us know and we'll enable it.

Raw Translated Docs​

If you prefer to read documentation in raw markdown files, you can now do that in any language:

git clone https://github.com/electron/electron-i18n
ls electron-i18n/content

App Pages​

As of today, any Electron app can easily have its own page on the Electron site. For a few examples, check out Etcher, 1Clipboard, or GraphQL Playground, pictured here on the Japanese version of the site:

There are some incredible Electron apps out there, but they're not always easy to find, and not every developer has the time or resources to build a proper website to market and distribute their app.

Using just a PNG icon file and a small amount of app metadata, we're able to collect a lot of information about a given app. Using data collected from GitHub, app pages can now display screenshots, download links, versions, release notes, and READMEs for every app that has a public repository. Using a color palette extracted from each app's icon, we can produce bold and accessible colors to give each app page some visual distinction.

The apps index page now also has categories and a keyword filter to find interesting apps like GraphQL GUIs and p2p tools.

If you've got an Electron app that you'd like featured on the site, open a pull request on the electron/electron-apps repository.

One-line Installation with Homebrew​

The Homebrew package manager for macOS has a subcommand called cask that makes it easy to install desktop apps using a single command in your terminal, like brew cask install atom.

We've begun collecting Homebrew cask names for popular Electron apps and are now displaying the installation command (for macOS visitors) on every app page that has a cask:

To view all the apps that have homebrew cask names, visit electronjs.org/apps?q=homebrew. If you know of other apps with casks that we haven't indexed yet, please add them!

🌐 A New Domain​

We've moved the site from electron.atom.io to a new domain: electronjs.org.

The Electron project was born inside Atom, GitHub's open-source text editor built on web technologies. Electron was originally called atom-shell. Atom was the first app to use it, but it didn't take long for folks to realize that this magical Chromium + Node runtime could be used for all kinds of different applications. When companies like Microsoft and Slack started to make use of atom-shell, it became clear that the project needed a new name.

And so "Electron" was born. In early 2016, GitHub assembled a new team to focus specifically on Electron development and maintenance, apart from Atom. In the time since, Electron has been adopted by thousands of app developers, and is now depended on by many large companies, many of which have Electron teams of their own.

Supporting GitHub's Electron projects like Atom and GitHub Desktop is still a priority for our team, but by moving to a new domain we hope to help clarify the technical distinction between Atom and Electron.

🐢🚀 Node.js Everywhere​

The previous Electron website was built with Jekyll, the popular Ruby-based static site generator. Jekyll is a great tool for building static websites, but the website had started to outgrow it. We wanted more dynamic capabilities like proper redirects and dynamic content rendering, so a Node.js server was the obvious choice.

The Electron ecosystem includes projects with components written in many different programming languages, from Python to C++ to Bash. But JavaScript is foundational to Electron, and it's the language used most in our community.

By migrating the website from Ruby to Node.js, we aim to lower the barrier to entry for people wishing to contribute to the website.

⚡️ Easier Open-Source Participation​

If you've got Node.js (8 or higher) and git installed on your system, you can easily get the site running locally:

git clone https://github.com/electron/electronjs.org
cd electronjs.org
npm install
npm run dev

The new website is hosted on Heroku. We use deployment pipelines and the Review Apps feature, which automatically creates a running copy of the app for every pull request. This makes it easy for reviewers to view the actual effects of a pull request on a live copy of the site.

🙏 Thanks to Contributors​

We'd like to give special thanks to all the folks around the world who have contributed their own time and energy to help improve Electron. The passion of the open-source community has helped immeasurably in making Electron a success. Thank you!