GitHub Action for building and releasing Electron apps

This is a GitHub Action for automatically building and releasing your Electron app using GitHub's CI/CD capabilities. It uses electron-builder to package your app and release it to a platform like GitHub Releases.

GitHub Actions allows you to build your app on macOS, Windows and Linux without needing direct access to each of these operating systems.

1. Install and configure electron-builder in your Electron app. You can read about this in the project's docs or in my blog post.

2. If you have a build script in package.json, make sure it does not run electron-builder. This action will do that for you.

3. If you are building for macOS, you'll want your code to be signed. GitHub Actions therefore needs access to your code signing certificate:

   • Open the Keychain Access app or the Apple Developer Portal. Export all certificates related to your app into a single file (e.g. certs.p12) and set a strong password
   • Base64-encode your certificates using the following command: base64 -i certs.p12 -o encoded.txt
   • In your project's GitHub repository, go to Settings → Secrets and add the following two variables:
     • mac_certs: Your encoded certificates, i.e. the content of the encoded.txt file you created before
     • mac_certs_password: The password you set when exporting the certificates

   The same goes for Windows code signing (windows_certs and windows_certs_password secrets).

4. Add a workflow file to your project (e.g. .github/workflows/build.yml):

   name: Build/release
   
   on: push
   
   jobs:
     release:
       runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
   
       # Platforms to build on/for
       strategy:
         matrix:
           os: [macos-10.14, windows-2019, ubuntu-18.04]
   
       steps:
         - name: Check out Git repository
           uses: actions/checkout@v1
   
         - name: Install Node.js, NPM and Yarn
           uses: actions/setup-node@v1
           with:
             node-version: 10
   
         - name: Build/release Electron app
           uses: samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder@v1
           with:
             # GitHub token, automatically provided to the action
             # (No need to define this secret in the repo settings)
             github_token: ${{ secrets.github_token }}
   
             # macOS code signing certificate
             mac_certs: ${{ secrets.mac_certs }}
             mac_certs_password: ${{ secrets.mac_certs_password }}
   
             # If the commit is tagged with a version (e.g. "v1.0.0"),
             # release the app after building
             release: ${{ startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/v') }}

Using this the workflow above, GitHub will build your app every time you push a commit.

When you want to create a new release, follow these steps:

1. Update the version in your project's package.json file (e.g. 1.2.3)
2. Commit that change (git commit -am v1.2.3)
3. Tag your commit (git tag v1.2.3). Make sure your tag name's format is v*.*.*. Your workflow will use this tag to detect when to create a release
4. Push your changes to GitHub (git push && git push --tags)

After building successfully, the GitHub action will then publish your release artifacts. By default, a new release draft will be created on GitHub with download links for your app. If you want to change this behavior, have a look at the electron-builder docs.

If you are building/releasing your Linux app for Snapcraft (which is electron-builder's default), you will additionally need to install and sign in to Snapcraft. This can be done by adding an action-snapcraft step before the action-electron-builder step:

- name: Install Snapcraft
  uses: samuelmeuli/action-snapcraft@v1
  with:
    # Log in to Snap Store
    snapcraft_token: ${{ secrets.snapcraft_token }}

You can read here how to obtain the snapcraft_token.

For an example of the action used in production, see Mini Diary.

Suggestions and contributions are always welcome! Please discuss larger changes via issue before submitting a pull request.