electronmon

To use electronmon, replace the electron command with electronmon when launching your application. You can pass the same arguments to electronmon that you would normally pass to the electron CLI.

electronmon automatically watches your files:

• Changes to main process files trigger a full application restart.
• Changes to renderer process files trigger a reload of the application's browser windows.

It works in-process and will not exit on the first application relaunch.

npx electronmon .

You can configure electronmon by adding an electronmon object to your package.json.

Currently, you can specify additional glob patterns to watch using the patterns key. This adds to the default patterns (['**/*', '!node_modules', '!node_modules/**/*', '!.*', '!**/*.map']). To ignore specific files or directories, prefix the glob with !.

{
  "electronmon": {
    "patterns": ["!test/**"]
  }
}

You can customize the special signal used by electronmon by setting the ELECTRONMON_SPECIAL_SIGNAL environment variable. If this environment variable is not provided, the system defaults to the value 37. The value is cast to a Number.

# Example: setting the signal to 42
ELECTRONMON_SPECIAL_SIGNAL=42 electronmon

The module is tested and supported on:

• OS: Windows, MacOS, and Linux
• Node.js: versions 10 through 18
• Electron: versions 8 through 23

You can use electronmon as a module to wrap an Electron application. It provides a development environment that watches for file changes and automatically restarts the main process or reloads the renderer process based on the type of change detected.

When you call the main function, it returns an object containing control methods to manage the lifecycle of the watched application.

const electronmon = require('electronmon');

// Initialize electronmon
electronmon({
  cwd: process.cwd(),
  args: ['.'],
  env: { MY_VAR: 'value' },
  logLevel: 'info',
  electronPath: '/path/to/electron',
  patterns: ['**/*.js', '**/*.html']
}).then((manager) => {
  // manager contains: close, destroy, reload, restart
  
  // Example: reload the app manually
  // manager.reload();

  // Example: clean up when your script exits
  // manager.destroy();
});

The electronmon function returns a Promise that resolves to a manager object. This object allows you to control the running Electron process and the file watcher:

• close(): Sends a SIGINT to the Electron application and waits for it to exit.
• destroy(): Closes the Electron application and stops the file watcher.
• reload(): A convenience method to reload the renderer thread in the app. If the app isn't running, it performs a full restart().
• restart(): Closes the current application and re-initializes the entire environment (watcher and app).

const manager = await electronmon();

await manager.reload();   // Reload renderer
await manager.restart();  // Full restart
await manager.close();    // Stop app
await manager.destroy(); // Stop app and watcher

You can run electronmon directly from the command line. The CLI entrypoint automatically resolves the local electron installation in the current working directory and passes command-line arguments, the current working directory, and configured patterns to the core engine.

Environment Variables

Configuration via package.json

The CLI reads a electronmon configuration object from your package.json file. Specifically, it looks for a patterns array to define which files or directories to monitor.

{
  "electronmon": {
    "patterns": ["src/**/*.js", "dist/**/*.js"]
  }
}

# Example usage (assuming electronmon is installed globally or via npx)

npx electronmon

# Or with custom log level

ELECTRONMON_LOGLEVEL=debug npx electronmon