Prepare the toolchain

Electron Forge creates and packages the project. Its current ecosystem tooling uses Node.js 22 as the minimum supported baseline.

Check both commands:

node --version
npm --version
git --version

Use the current Node.js LTS release. Your development Node.js runs npm, Forge, and build scripts. The packaged Electron app uses the Node.js version bundled inside Electron.

Those versions can differ. We will inspect the packaged runtime later with process.versions instead of assuming it matches node --version.

Packaging also uses operating-system tools. On macOS, install the Xcode command-line tools. On Windows, use PowerShell or Command Prompt for the course commands. On Linux, install the build packages reported by your distribution if a maker requests them.

Native Node.js modules add another boundary. They must be rebuilt for Electron’s application binary interface. Forge handles common rebuild steps, but a module that works in plain Node.js can still fail inside Electron.

Create a normal development folder. Do not build the project inside a cloud-synchronized or network-mounted directory. Packaging tools create many files and work best on a local disk.

Record the versions in a small TESTING.md file. When packaging later fails on one machine, this baseline will tell you whether the toolchain changed.