Ask HN: Electron Cross Platform

[quickthrower2]

Hi all. What is your solution to packaging and distributing an electron app on different platforms? Do you do it yourself or is there a SaaS for this? If DIY do you use cloud computers for each platform or physical machines? Any frustrations?

I’m finding it pretty hard just to build a windows msi. Finally cracked it but now need to figure out updates.

[patelpankaj]

Maybe you can look into the build scripts of some opensource tools built on top of electron.

[patelpankaj → patelpankaj]

I know one from GhostCMS; Desktop tool for editing the posts: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-Desktop

[quickthrower2 → patelpankaj]

Thanks that looks like an extensive implementation. I’ll try it when I’m back on a pc! Not sure that their Travis.yml runs it and therefore how or where from you run the packaging scripts.

[patelpankaj]

There you go: https://www.electron.build/multi-platform-build

[quickthrower2 → patelpankaj]

Yes I’ve seen that but in practice it’s not that easy to set up. I might sound lazy but for electron being a simple way to distribute cross platform apps it is harder than I thought. That might be the OS”s fault as much as anything. WiX and all that are tricky to use too which I think this would ultimately use for Windows.