Distributing

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Continuing on from the Creating UI Guide.

Let's add two more scripts to our package.json file to get our app ready for distribution. build:canary and build:stable:

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/bun": "latest"
  },
  "peerDependencies": {
    "typescript": "^5.0.0"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "electrobun": "^0.0.1"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "bun run build:dev && electrobun dev",
    "build:dev": "bun install && electrobun build",
    "build:canary": "electrobun build env=canary",
    "build:stable": "electrobun build env=stable"
  }
}

In your terminal you can now run

bun run build:canary

// or

bun run build:stable

Both of these non-dev builds will:

• build an optimized MacOS app bundle
• tar and compress it using state of the art compression
• generate another self-extracting app bundle
• create an artifacts folder for distribution

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All you need to distribute your app is a static file host like S3 or Google Cloud Storage. There's no need to run a server beyond that.

Let's assume you've set up a Google Cloud Storage bucket with a subfolder for this application and add it to electrobun.config:

electrobun.config

{
  "app": {
    "name": "My App",
    "identifier": "dev.my.app",
    "version": "0.0.1"
  },
  "build": {
    "bun": {
      "entrypoint": "src/bun/index.ts"
    },
    "views": {
      "main-ui": {
        "entrypoint": "src/main-ui/index.ts"
      }
    },
    "copy": {
      "src/main-ui/index.html": "views/main-ui/index.html"
    }
  },
  "release": {
    "bucketUrl": "https://storage.googleapis.com/mybucketname/myapp/"
  }
}

You can make your app available by simply uploading the contents of the artifacts folder into the myapp folder of your bucket. The artifacts folder will have two subfolders, one for canary and one for stable.

Once you've uploaded the artifacts to your bucket when your run a non-dev build command again like bun run build:canary the Electrobun cli will automatically download the current version of your app, use our custom optimize BSDIFF implementation to generate a patch file and add the patch file to your artifacts folder.

Visit the Updater API docs to learn how to make your app check for and install updates.

What are all the files in the artifacts folder

// Assuming your app's name is MyApp and you did a canary build you'll have the following files:

// This file contains metadata for the version of your app you just built
/artifacts/canary/update.json

// This is the file you would link to on your marketing site for users to download
// when first installing your app. It's a dmg that contains your app in its
// self-extracting form
/artifacts/canary/MyApp-canary.dmg

// This is a copy of the compressed tar file of your app bundle. There's a copy
// of this inside the self-extracting bundle. When your app updates itself if there
// are no patch files available it will download this to update your app.
/artifacts/canary/MyApp-canary.app.tar.zst

// These files are named <hash>.patch. The Electrobun cli generates patch files
// from the current version on your static cloud hosting to the version your just
// built.

// When replacing the contents of your static file host you can keep as many old
// patch files as you like. Users with older versions of your app will keep downloading
// the next patch automatically when updating.
/artifacts/canary/jsf87yasf.patch