Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the menubar appear when running in development mode, but disappear when packaged?

Note: as of Electron 5, the menubar always appears, so this question is not relevant to officially supported versions of Electron.

Based on a comment from @MarshallOfSound:

When you're running in "development mode" (for example, electron /path/to/app), Electron uses the default_app codepath to run your app, which also provides a default menubar. When the app is packaged, Electron runs your app directly. To have a menubar that's consistent between development and packaged modes, you'll need to define it yourself.

Why isn't my `ignore` option working?

As stated in the documentation for ignore, it uses "[one] or more additional regular expression patterns. […] Please note that glob patterns will not work."

Why isn't the relative path in my app code working?

To make a path work in both development and packaged mode, you'll need to generate a path based on the location of the JavaScript file that is referencing the file. For example, if you had an app structure like the following:

AppName
├── package.json
├── data
│   └── somedata.json
└── src
    └── main.js

In src/main.js, you would access data/somedata.json similar to this:

const path = require('path');
const jsonFilename = path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'data', 'somedata.json');
console.log(require(jsonFilename));

How do I set an icon on Linux?

The docs for icon already show how to set an icon on your BrowserWindow, but your dock/taskbar may not use that and instead use the Icon value in your .desktop file. The Linux distributable creators can help you set/distribute the appropriate icon in that case.

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