Tinkerwell 4 is out now! Get the most popular PHP Scratchpad application. Learn more

Desktop apps with Electron

Create desktop apps with web technologies.

Learn how to build, publish, and distribute desktop applications as a web developer by using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Watch now

What you'll learn

This course teaches you how to use your existing knowledge of tools like VueJS, React, TailwindCSS and NodeJS to build cross-platform desktop applications.

Even if you are a complete beginner, this course guides you through the process of creating a desktop application from scratch.

Chances are pretty high that you've already used Electron applications before: We built Tinkerwell, Invoker, and HELO with Electron, and also well-known applications like VSCode or Slack make use of Electron and benefit from the Electron ecosystem with the power of Javascript.

We've compressed all our knowledge into three hours of video. Learn everything that you need to know about building Electron apps in one evening.

Learn more on desktopappswithelectron.com

Course overview

  • Getting started
    • Up and running
    • Hot Reloading
    • Electron processes
    • Debugging
    • Vue Devtools
    • Browser windows
    • Installing Tailwind CSS
  • Building RegExpress
    • The input component
    • The Matches component
    • App menus
    • Keyboard shortcuts
    • Edit functionality
    • Opening files
    • Reading files
    • IPC Communication
    • Regex visualization
    • Storing the visualization
    • Background thread communication
    • Saving files
    • Match Output
  • Testing your app
    • Integration tests with Spectron
    • Testing user interactions
    • Testing IPC communication
  • Build a menubar app
    • Getting started
    • Devtools in menubar
    • Menubar app idea
    • Spawning commands
    • Identifying shared sites
    • Open URLs in the default browser
    • Keeping track of child processes
    • Add 3rd party resources
    • Menu bar context menus
  • Packaging and Distribution
    • Building the app
    • App Icons
    • Building for multiple OS at once
    • Distribute your app to GitHub
    • Custom distribution (S3, Spaces, custom URL, ...)
    • GitHub Actions
    • Notarizing Mac Builds
    • Error handling
  • Licensing your apps
    • Licensing introduction
    • Offline license key validation
    • Adding License key validation UI
    • Global state
    • Reading the global state

Popular examples

Thousands of developers use our applications in their daily work. Tinkerwell is the magical code editor that runs your code within local and remote PHP applications, Invoker is a no-code admin panel for all your Laravel appliactions, and HELO makes email testing a breeze.