How to set up hot reload on Electron

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Published Aug 22 2020

When working on an Electron app, it’s very handy to set up hot reload, so that the application updates without having to restart it.

You can do that using the npm module electron-reloader.

Suppose you have this sample Electron application:

index.js

const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron')

function createWindow() {
  // Create the browser window.
  const win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    webPreferences: {
      nodeIntegration: true,
    },
  })

  // and load the index.html of the app.
  win.loadFile('index.html')
}

app.whenReady().then(createWindow)

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Hello World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Install electron-reloader as a development dependency:

npm install -D electron-reloader

Then add this line to the index.js file:

try {
  require('electron-reloader')(module)
} catch (_) {}

and that’s it! Now when you start the application using electron ., or npm start if you have

"start": "electron .",

in your package.json, any change you apply to the application files will be reflected in the application window.