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

[MarshallOfSound]

Any issues with electron-builder should be raised on their repository.

That said, electron-builder enables ASAR support by default. When your PDF is in an ASAR you can't call openExternal on it. Read into ASAR support here https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/wiki/Options#BuildMetadata-asar