electron-userland/electron-builder

electron-builder is a tool for packaging desktop apps that were built with Electron, the framework that lets developers create Mac, Windows, and Linux apps using web technology. It also works with Proton Native. Once a developer has the code for an Electron app, electron-builder turns that code into the kind of installer file a normal user would download and double-click. It ships with built-in support for "auto update" so finished apps can pull in new versions on their own. The project covers a long list of output formats. For Mac it can produce dmg, pkg, and mas builds. For Windows it produces nsis installers, web installers, portable apps, AppX bundles for the Windows Store, MSI, and Squirrel.Windows. For Linux it produces AppImage, snap, deb, rpm, freebsd, pacman, p5p, and apk packages. There are also generic archive formats like 7z, zip, and various tar variants that work on all platforms. A lot of what electron-builder does is the awkward plumbing around shipping a desktop app. It handles code signing on a continuous integration server or a developer machine, compiles native Node modules so they match the target platform, and downloads the extra tools it needs on demand so the developer does not have to install them by hand. It can publish the finished artifacts to GitHub Releases, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Bintray, and it can build Linux or Windows apps from any host machine using Docker images. Using it is mostly a matter of adding electron-builder as a dev dependency through yarn, npm, pnpm, or bun, then writing a "build" section inside the project's package.json. That section sets things like the application id, the Mac category, and which files should be included. The README points to electron-webpack-quick-start as a recommended way to scaffold a new project, plus a documentation site at electron.build for the full configuration reference.