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electron-userland / electron-webpack

Scripts and configurations to compile Electron applications using webpack
https://webpack.electron.build/
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Question: what's the relationship between electron-webpack and electron-forge? #342

Open zhaoyao91 opened 4 years ago

zhaoyao91 commented 4 years ago

I am searching for a solution to build electron react app. I've found both electron-webpack and electron-forge are under the electron-userland organization, but they use quite different internal tech.

I don't know why the org provides two main solutions and which one is preferred. Could you please share some thoughts or stories? Thanks.

alexweber commented 4 years ago

AFAIK there is no relationship.... electron-webpack is a module for helping you use electron with webpack and provices a streamlined experience for working with electron-builder to package and distribute apps. Electron forge is a different approach, it adds a boilerplate instead of a module and does a lot of the same things.

See this for a more detailed explanation of builder vs forge: https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/1193#issuecomment-276583585

b-zurg commented 4 years ago

It's honestly a mess. Both have their benefits and drawbacks as a dev environment.

I think the simplicity of setup is a huge plus when it comes to these projects - and in my opinion electron-webpack comes more fully featured out of the box in the dev environment aspect and is nice and configurable, however it has some pain points and bugs and is not sooo well maintained (but not dead).

Electron-forge is seemingly better at first glance but has its fair share of issues and bugs - especially if you start including static files or dealing with more interesting webpack configurations... basically if you want to do literally anything apart from what they have in their examples.

Honestly I think the electron community should centralize around a solid set of tools instead of being increasingly fragmented as it is today.