Electron IPC is good, but difficult to maintain and scale, either because of the numerous channels you have to remember, or because of the inconsistent API between processes and the absence of inferred types of your channels and handlers. These are some of the things that interprocess comes to solve!
invoke
and handle
methods in both processes with the same expected behaviorIn your terminal, run:
npm i interprocess
pnpm i interprocess
yarn add interprocess
Let's build something simple that can show you some of the interprocess's power!
First, create the following folders at src
:
shared/ipcs
(this folder structure is optional)Then, create a file named as index.ts
in the ipcs
folder with the following content:
import { createInterprocess } from 'interprocess'
export const { ipcMain, ipcRenderer, exposeApiToGlobalWindow } =
createInterprocess({
main: {
async getPing(_, data: 'ping') {
const message = `from renderer: ${data} on main process`
console.log(message)
return message
},
},
renderer: {
async getPong(_, data: 'pong') {
const message = `from main: ${data} on renderer process`
console.log(message)
return message
},
},
})
On the main process:
:warning: Don't forget to add
sandbox: false
to the BrowserWindow because it's required to load the preload script properly!
import { BrowserWindow, app } from 'electron'
import { ipcMain } from 'shared/ipcs'
const { handle, invoke } = ipcMain
app.whenReady().then(() => {
const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
webPreferences: {
preload: path.join(__dirname, '../preload/index.js'),
sandbox: false, // sandbox must be false
},
})
handle.getPing()
mainWindow.webContents.on('dom-ready', () => {
invoke.getPong(mainWindow, 'pong')
})
})
In the preload script:
import { exposeApiToGlobalWindow } from 'shared/ipcs'
const { key, api } = exposeApiToGlobalWindow({
exposeAll: true, // expose handlers, invokers and removers
})
declare global {
interface Window {
[key]: typeof api
}
}
On the renderer process:
const { invoke, handle } = window.api
invoke.getPing('ping')
handle.getPong()
This is a simple way to work with interprocess, but there's a lot of more cool features you can take advantage, like overrides, code splitting, invoker's response (for renderer and main process 🎉) and more. See the Knowledge section for more
Note: contributions are always welcome, but always ask first, — please — before work on a PR.
That said, there's a bunch of ways you can contribute to this project, like by: