This is a test repository I used for experimenting the auto deployment of a basic electron app to create, with electron-builder, the bundles for the different platforms (win32, macos, linux).

Building of the app is done with the CI services integrated with github, especially github actions. I initially tried with travis CI but got issue having a working travis.yml config. I certainly more quickly found an appropriate github action workflow file than a travis file (in a word, this experience does not mean it cannot work with travis ... and to tell you the truth I struggled installing snapcraft for the linux packages but anyway disabled that build with electron-builder).

For MacOS, the auto-update does not work. And, well, you must sign your app to make it work it seems and to sign an app you need a certificate from Apple, which, and that's unbelievable, requires you to pay fees. So if you want to provide a service to Mac users, you need to pay fees. Great.

The icon icons/markdown-brands.svg is provided by fontawesome.com and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

It has been then converted to png and icns for this demo application.

For the creation of the png 1024x1024 icon using imagemagick convert :

convert markdown-brands.svg -resize x1024 -thumbnail '1024>x1024' -background white -gravity center -extent 1024x1024 icon.png

And then for the creation of the icns icon for MacOS, using png2icns :

for s in {16,32,48,128,256,512}; do convert icon.png -resize $sx$s icon_${s}px.png; done
png2icns icon.icns icon_*.png 

For the creation of the Windows ico file:

convert icon.png -define icon:auto-resize=16,32,48,64,256 icon.ico

Let me tell you Open Source is fantastic.

For testing the app, you simply :

cd app
yarn
yarn start

The app has been developed following the book "Electron project: build over 9 cross-platform desktop applications from scratch"

Building the packages and providing draft releases is done with github actions especially the samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder GitHub Action.

That's the GitHub action which is automatically building the app and pushing the assets in a draft release. The only thing you have to do at the end is validate the release.