electron-forge-plugin-dependencies

Help Electron Forge Vite/Webpack project collect dependencies.


Install

``bash
npm i -D electron-forge-plugin-dependencies
`

Usage

forge.config.js

`js
module.exports = {
plugins: [
{
name: 'electron-forge-plugin-dependencies',
config: {/ config /},
},
],
};
`

forge.config.ts

`ts
import type { ForgeConfig } from '@electron-forge/shared-types';
import { DependenciesPlugin } from 'electron-forge-plugin-dependencies';

const config: ForgeConfig = {
plugins: [
new DependenciesPlugin({/ config /}),
],
};

export default config;
`

API (Define)

`ts
export interface DependenciesPluginConfig {
/**
* The dependencies package by Electron Forge, default to the dependencies in the current project's package.json.
*/
dependencies?: string[]
/**
* Function to filter copied files/directories. Return true to copy the item, false to ignore it.
* Can also return a Promise that resolves to true or false (or pass in an async function).
*/
filter?: (src: string, dest: string) => boolean | Promise
}
``

Why

Oftentimes, Electron Forge cannot build some third-party modules properly, especially C/C++ native modules. This is because they cannot be properly processed by Vite/Webpack, but they can be loaded normally by Node.js with the require function.
In order to ensure that an Electron application can work properly, we need to collect them into the application's node_modules. This seems stupid, but it works.