electron-download

Downloads an Electron release zip from GitHub.

Used by electron-prebuilt and electron-packager

Usage

Note: Requires Node >= 4.0 to run.

1$ npm install --global electron-download
2$ electron-download --version=0.31.1

1const download = require('electron-download')
2
3download({
4  version: '0.25.1',
5  arch: 'ia32',
6  platform: 'win32',
7  cache: './zips'
8}, function (err, zipPath) {
9  // zipPath will be the path of the zip that it downloaded.
10  // If the zip was already cached it will skip
11  // downloading and call the cb with the cached zip path.
12  // If it wasn't cached it will download the zip and save
13  // it in the cache path.
14})

If you don't specify arch or platform args it will use the built-in os module to get the values from the current OS. Specifying version is mandatory. If there is a SHASUMS256.txt file available for the version, the file downloaded will be validated against its checksum to ensure that it was downloaded without errors.

You can also use electron-download to download the chromedriver, ffmpeg, mksnapshot, and symbols assets for a specific Electron release. This can be configured by setting the chromedriver, ffmpeg, mksnapshot, or symbols property to true in the specified options object. Only one of these options may be specified per download call.

You can force a re-download of the asset and the SHASUM file by setting the force option to true.

If you would like to override the mirror location, three options are available. The mirror URL is composed as url = ELECTRON_MIRROR + ELECTRON_CUSTOM_DIR + '/' + ELECTRON_CUSTOM_FILENAME.

You can set the ELECTRON_MIRROR or NPM_CONFIG_ELECTRON_MIRROR environment variable or mirror opt variable to use a custom base URL for grabbing Electron zips. The same pattern applies to ELECTRON_CUSTOM_DIR and ELECTRON_CUSTOM_FILENAME:

1## Electron Mirror of China
2ELECTRON_MIRROR="https://npm.taobao.org/mirrors/electron/"
3
4## or for a local mirror
5ELECTRON_MIRROR="https://10.1.2.105/"
6ELECTRON_CUSTOM_DIR="our/internal/filePath"
7ELECTRON_CUSTOM_FILENAME="electron.zip"

You can set ELECTRON_MIRROR in .npmrc as well, using the lowercase name:

1electron_mirror=https://10.1.2.105/
2electron_custom_dir="our/internal/filePath"
3electron_custom_filename="electron.zip"

You can also set the same variables in your project's package.json:

1{
2    "name" : "my-electron-project",
3    "config" : {
4        "electron_mirror": "https://10.1.2.105/",
5        "electron_custom_dir": "our/internal/filePath",
6        "electron_custom_filename": "electron.zip"
7    }
8}

The order of precedence is:

1. npm config or .npmrc, uppercase (process.env.NPM_CONFIG_ELECTRON_*)
2. npm config or .npmrc, lowercase(process.env.npm_config_electron_*)
3. package.json (process.env.npm_package_config_electron_*)
4. environment variables (process.env.ELECTRON_*)
5. the options given to download
6. defaults

You can also disable checksum validation if you really want to (this is in general a bad idea). Do this by setting disableChecksumSafetyCheck to true in the options object. Use this only when testing local build of Electron, if you have internal builds of Electron you should generate the SHASUMS file yourself and let electron-download still perform its hash validations.

Cache location

The location of the cache depends on the operating system, the defaults are:

• Linux: $XDG_CACHE_HOME or ~/.cache/electron/
• MacOS: ~/Library/Caches/electron/
• Windows: $LOCALAPPDATA/electron/Cache or ~/AppData/Local/electron/Cache/

You can set the ELECTRON_CACHE environment variable to set cache location explicitly.