File access after building

[justijndepover]

• electron: ^1.4.2
• electron-builder: ^7.9.0
• Operating system: macOS Sierra

Inside my app I have a link to open up an external pdf file. For this to work properly I send a message with IPC from my render process to my main process.

inside my main I have

ipcMain.on('open_file', function(event, file){
    shell.openItem(__dirname + file);
})

inside my render process i have

$('.open_file').on('click', function(event){
    event.preventDefault();

    var url = $(this).data('url');
    ipcRenderer.send('open_file', url)
})

When i use npm start to run my application everything works fine. But when i build my app with electron-builder nothing happens when I try to open the file. No errors show up in my console. Am I doing something wrong with my paths? Or could it be that the electon-builder does not include the pdf's to my package? They live inside my app directory

[develar]

Probably it is packed into asar and cannot be accessed externally. Please use https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/wiki/Options#BuildMetadata-extraResources (see #751).

[justijndepover]

Is it also possible to add a rule in my package.json build to unpack the file?

"asar.unpack" : "/app/*/document/*.pdf",

The files are located as following:

/app/nl/document/jaydess-notice.pdf
/app/nl/document/mirena-notice.pdf
/app/fr/document/jaydess-notice.pdf
/app/fr/document/mirena-notice.pdf

Excuse me if I ask stupid questions but i don't really understand the asar packaging.

[develar]

@justijndepover Please do not use asar.unpack. It is supported, but I strongly advice you to use more smart and more user-friendly extraResources or extraFiles.

e.g.:

"build": {
  "extraResources": "app/*/document/*.pdf"
}

Please see https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/751#issuecomment-247590609

[justijndepover]

Thanks, that worked!

[develar]

Solution — pdf files should be not packed to asar automatically.