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node.jselectronrequire

Require main in Electron

In an electron app I have

exports.sayWord = function(){
    console.log("some word")
};

in main.js. Now, in renderer.js, I have

const main = require('./main.js');

But when I run the app and open the devtools I have the error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'on' of undefined
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/sean/elecapp/main.js:47:4)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/sean/elecapp/main.js:70:3)
    at Module._compile (module.js:571:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:488:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:447:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:439:3)
    at Module.require (module.js:498:17)
    at require (internal/module.js:20:19)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/sean/elecapp/renderer.js:20:14)

Line 47 is:

app.on('ready', createWindow);

but this does not make sense because the window is created, so obviously electron knew what app an createWindow were. I suspect that the problem has something to do with the fact that I am requiring main.js because I put the function sayWord in other files and when I required those nothing was wrong.

Solution

  • The reason you get the error is because the main-process and the renderer-process do not have access to the same modules. For example app can be accessed in the main-process directly via const {app} = require("electron"), but in the renderer you can only access a proxy object via const {app} = require("electron").remote. But you shouldn't use remote.app either to fix your problem. If you were to modify your main.js script to run on both main-process and renderer-process, you would probably create a loop of creating new windows!

    You should outsource the sayWord to a different file. If you plan to send data between main and renderer, then I would suggest to use ipcMain and ipcRenderer instead.