asar-trim An experimental CLI tool that trims unnecessary files from asar archives for Electron applications.

Installation

npm i asar-trim -g

Usage

$ asar-trim <path to resources containing app.asar>

What is it?

Many popular Electron applications today sure like to include their dev dependencies, raw frontend assets, and even source files in their final package which inflates the already-large size to greater lengths.

This tool attempts to delete these files and repack the asar file to produce a much slimmer archive.

What does it do?

There are a few things asar-trim will do when it does its optimization:

• Deletes various files that have no use in the application
  • You can see what is deleted here
• Minifies .json files
• Minifies and removes unneeded properties from package.json files

Commands

<default>

Trims the app.asar file at the location denoted by the path provided.

Usage

$ asar-trim .

Options

Option	Default Value	Description
-b, --backup	false	Create a backup of the original app.asar file
-k, --keep-extracted	false	Whether to keep the extracted app.asar contents after optimizing instead of deleting them
-h, --hint-file		Path to your app's generated load order hint file, see https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10163

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Planned Features

• Trimming app.asar.unpacked directory
• Improved backing up
• Additional options to customize what files will be deleted