interprocess: 💬 A scalable and type-safe Electron IPC management tool with enhanced DX

Electron IPC is good, but difficult to maintain and scale, either because of the numerous channels you have to remember, or because of the inconsistent API between processes and the absence of inferred types of your channels and handlers. These are some of the things that interprocess comes to solve!

💬 Features

• 🚀 Best-in-class DX with a fully-typed API
• 🧠 Enchanced and consistent API
• 🔥 Type-safe and scalable
• 🪄 Code splitting support
• 🕸️ All edges connected (APIs to handle all processes)
• 💖 invoke and handle methods in both processes with the same expected behavior

Requirements

• Node.js >= 14.0.0
• Electron >= 12.0.0
• TypeScript >= 4.8.0

💬 Installation

In your terminal, run:

• npm

  npm i interprocess

• pnpm

  pnpm i interprocess

• yarn

  yarn add interprocess

💬 Usage

Let's build something simple that can show you some of the interprocess's power!

First, create the following folders at src:

• shared/ipcs (this folder structure is optional)

Then, create a file named as index.ts in the ipcs folder with the following content:

import { createInterprocess } from 'interprocess'

export const { ipcMain, ipcRenderer, exposeApiToGlobalWindow } =
  createInterprocess({
    main: {
      async getPing(_, data: 'ping') {
        const message = `from renderer: ${data} on main process`
        
        console.log(message)

        return message
      },
    },

    renderer: {
      async getPong(_, data: 'pong') {
        const message = `from main: ${data} on renderer process`
        
        console.log(message)

        return message
      },
    },
  })

On the main process:

⚠️ Don't forget to add sandbox: false to the BrowserWindow because it's required to load the preload script properly!

import { BrowserWindow, app } from 'electron'

import { ipcMain } from 'shared/ipcs'

const { handle, invoke } = ipcMain

app.whenReady().then(() => {
  const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, '../preload/index.js'),
      sandbox: false, // sandbox must be false
    },
  })

  handle.getPing()

  mainWindow.webContents.on('dom-ready', () => {
    invoke.getPong(mainWindow, 'pong')
  })
})

In the preload script:

import { exposeApiToGlobalWindow } from 'shared/ipcs'

const { key, api } = exposeApiToGlobalWindow({
  exposeAll: true, // expose handlers, invokers and removers
})

declare global {
  interface Window {
    [key]: typeof api
  }
}

On the renderer process:

const { invoke, handle } = window.api

invoke.getPing('ping')
handle.getPong()

This is a simple way to work with interprocess, but there's a lot of more cool features you can take advantage, like overrides, code splitting, invoker's response (for renderer and main process 🎉) and more. See the Knowledge section for more

💬 Knowledge

• Docs

• Examples

  • Executable
  • CodeSandbox (simple)
  • CodeSandbox (advanced)

💬 Contributing

Note: contributions are always welcome, but always ask first, — please — before work on a PR.

That said, there's a bunch of ways you can contribute to this project, like by:

• 🪲 Reporting a bug
• 📄 Improving the docs
• 🚨 Sharing this project and recommending it to your friends
• 💵 Supporting this project on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon
• 🐛 Funding an issue on IssueHunt
• 🌟 Giving a star on this repository

License

MIT © Dalton Menezes