Objective

Building a Todo app. To do that we will use angular2.

Todo app angular2

Follow the tutorial

Transform Todo app in to desktop app

First you need to install Electron into you directory.

npm install --save-dev electron

Edit you package.json to add the main electron entry point:

{
    //...some entries
    "main" : "main.js"
    //...some other entries
}

Create the entry point, main.js, at the root of you app directory

const electron = require('electron')
// Module to control application life.
const app = electron.app
// Module to create native browser window.
const BrowserWindow = electron.BrowserWindow

const path = require('path')
const url = require('url')

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
let mainWindow

function createWindow () {
  // Create the browser window.
  mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, height: 600})

  // and load the index.html of the app.
  mainWindow.loadURL(url.format({
    pathname: path.join(__dirname, 'dist/index.html'),
    protocol: 'file:',
    slashes: true
  }))

  // Open the DevTools.
  mainWindow.webContents.openDevTools()

  // Emitted when the window is closed.
  mainWindow.on('closed', function () {
    // Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
    // in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
    // when you should delete the corresponding element.
    mainWindow = null
  })
}

// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
// Some APIs can only be used after this event occurs.
app.on('ready', createWindow)

// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', function () {
  // On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
  // to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
  if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
    app.quit()
  }
})

app.on('activate', function () {
  // On OS X it's common to re-create a window in the app when the
  // dock icon is clicked and there are no other windows open.
  if (mainWindow === null) {
    createWindow()
  }
})

// In this file you can include the rest of your app's specific main process
// code. You can also put them in separate files and require them here.

This code is extracted from the documentation for creating a basic electron app. The most important part here is the line where you explicitly tell electron to load the app index.html :

//...some codes
// and load the index.html of the app.
  mainWindow.loadURL(url.format({
    pathname: path.join(__dirname, 'dist/index.html'),
    protocol: 'file:',
    slashes: true
  }))
//...some codes

You noticed that we try to load a file that is in a dist directory, but it's not exist yet. To create it, we will need to build our angular2 app:

ng build

Note: If you need to build every time you edit your app (useful in dev mode) you can use the --watch* option. With this, when you will edit a file it will launch a build task : ng build --watch=true

And we can try our electron app :

electron .

To go further

You can save the user's todos in order to get them back when he closes de app. To do that you can use NeDB