elm-desktop-app
is the simplest way to write desktop applications in Elm.
It's built on top of Electron, and it currently supports the following uses:
- Your app can persist state to disk as a JSON file
- automatically to your end user's "userData" directory
- to a JSON file specified by your end user
- Build and package Mac, Linux, and Windows apps
- (soon) prepare and publish an npm package that can launch your app from the command line
Usage
Use the elm-desktop-app
command line tool to create a new project, which includes a dependency on the avh4/elm-desktop-app
Elm pacakge and a working starting-point for you app:
npm install -g elm-desktop-app mkdir my-appcd my-appelm-desktop-app init
Edit the generated src/Main.elm
to implement your app and define how to persist data (you can see the full example code here):
import DesktopAppimport DesktopApp.JsonMapping as JsonMapping main : DesktopApp.Program Model Msgmain = DesktopApp.program { init = ( init, Cmd.none ) , update = \msg model -> ( update msg model, Cmd.none ) , subscriptions = \model -> Sub.none , view = view , persistence = Just persistence } type alias Model = { name : String , count : Int } ... persistence : JsonMapping.ObjectMapping Model Msgpersistence = JsonMapping.object Loaded |> JsonMapping.with "name" .name JsonMapping.string |> JsonMapping.with "count" .count JsonMapping.int
Use the command line tool to run your app:
elm-desktop-app run
The user data for your app is automatically persisted! 💾🎉
You can easily build Mac, Linux, and Windows packages (packages are built to ./elm-stuff/elm-desktop-app/app/dist/
):
elm-desktop-app package