DEPRECATED: electron

DEPRECATED: electron-remote: an asynchronous 'remote', and more

This project is no longer maintained, pull requests are no longer being reviewed or merged and issues are no longer being responded to.

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remote

The Quickest of Quick Starts

Calling main process modules from a renderer

import { createProxyForMainProcessModule } from 'electron-remote';

// app is now a proxy for the app module in the main process
const app = createProxyForMainProcessModule('app');

// The difference is all methods return a Promise instead of blocking
const memoryInfo = await app.getAppMemoryInfo();

Calling code in other windows

import { createProxyForRemote } from 'electron-remote';

// myWindowJs is now a proxy object for myWindow's `window` global object
const myWindowJs = createProxyForRemote(myWindow);

// Functions suffixed with _get will read a value
userAgent = await myWindowJs.navigator.userAgent_get()

Renderer Taskpool

import { requireTaskPool } from 'electron-remote';

const myCoolModule = requireTaskPool(require.resolve('./my-cool-module'));

// This method will run synchronously, but in a background BrowserWindow process
// so that your app will not block
let result = await myCoolModule.calculateDigitsOfPi(100000);

But I like Remote!

Remote is super convenient! But it also has some downsides - its main downside is that its action is synchronous. This means that both the main and window processes will wait for a method to finish running. Even for quick methods, calling it too often can introduce scroll jank and generally cause performance problems.

electron-remote is a version of remote that, while less ergonomic, guarantees that it won't block the calling thread.

Using createProxyForRemote

createProxyForRemoteexecuteJavaScriptwindowremote

This provides a number of very important advantages:

createProxyForRemoteeval

How do I get properties if everything is a Promise tho???

_get()

import { createProxyForRemote } from 'electron-remote';

// myWindowJs is now a proxy object for myWindow's `window` global object
const myWindowJs = createProxyForRemote(myWindow);

// Functions suffixed with _get will read a value
myWindowJs.navigator.userAgent_get()
  .then((agent) => console.log(`The user agent is ${agent}`));

But do this first!

createProxyForRemoteinitializeEvalHandler()

Bringing it all together

// In my window's main.js
initializeEvalHandler();
window.addNumbers = (a,b) => a + b;


// In my main process
let myWindowProxy = createProxyForRemote(myWindow);
myWindowProxy.addNumbers(5, 5)
  .then((x) => console.log(x));

>>> 10

Using createProxyForMainProcessModule

remotecreateProxyForRemoteevalipc.sendSync

Here Be Dragons

electron-remote has a number of significant caveats versus the remote module that you should definitely be aware of:

• Remote values must be Serializable

JSON.stringify

let myWindowProxy = createProxyForRemote(myWindow);

// XXX: BAD - HTML elements aren't serializable
let obj = myWindowProxy.document.createElement('h1');

• Remote event listeners aren't supported

Anything that involves an event handler isn't going to work:

// XXX: BAD - You can't add event handlers
myWindowProxy.document.addEventListener('onBlur', (e) => console.log("Blur!"));

The Renderer Taskpool

Renderer Taskpools provide an automatic way to use BrowserWindows as "background processes" that auto-scales based on usage, similar to Grand Central Dispatch or the .NET TPL Taskpool. This works by allowing you to provide a Module that you'd like to load in the remote processes, which will be loaded and unloaded on the fly according to demand.

Let's look at the example again:

import { requireTaskPool } from 'electron-remote';

const myCoolModule = requireTaskPool(require.resolve('./my-cool-module'));

// This method will run synchronously, but in a background BrowserWindow process
// so that your app will not block
let result = await myCoolModule.calculateDigitsOfPi(100000);

requireTaskPool

More Dragons

requireTaskPool

The remote-ajax module

remote-ajax

import { requireTaskPool } from 'electron-remote';

const remoteAjax = requireTaskPool(require.resolve('electron-remote/remote-ajax'));

// Result is the object that XmlHttpRequest gives you
let result = await remoteAjax.get('https://httpbin.org/get');
console.log(result.url)

>>> 'https://httpbin.org/get'

See the documentation for Rx-DOM for how these methods work.

downloadFileOrUrl

/**
 * Downloads a path as either a file path or a HTTP URL to a specific place
 *
 * @param  {string} pathOrUrl   Either an HTTP URL or a file path.
 * @return {string}             The contents as a UTF-8 decoded string.
 */
function downloadFileOrUrl(pathOrUrl, target)