wiki/wiki/nativefier.md

Nativefier

Nativefier is an command-line tool to create desktop apps from websites. This way a single website can be used as an application in contrast to opening it in a browser. It uses Electron which in turn uses Chromium.

Setup

Nativefier is available on GitHub. Additionally for some Linux distributions like Arch Linux' AUR it is available via a package often called nodejs-nativefier.

Usage

This section addresses various usages of Nativefier.

Creating an Application from a Website

The following command example creates an Electron desktop application in a folder inside the home directory. The app will be named Mastodon will be x64 compatible with a resolution of 1024x768 pixel. It will create an icon in the systems tray and disable the Chromium developer tools (disable-dev-tools). The website to make into the application will be https://mastodon.technology. Change these values accordingly.

nativefier --name Mastodon \
--platform linux --arch x64 \
--width 1024 --height 768 \
--tray --disable-dev-tools \
--single-instance https://mastodon.technology

By default URLs that are not belonging to the one that is given by --single-instance will be blocked. There is an unchangeable whitelist. Single URLs that are not on the whitelist can be excluded and so not be blocked by using the --internal-urls flag. A complete example using this flag can look like the following.

nativefier --name Mastodon \
--platform linux --arch x64 \
--width 1024 --height 768 \
--tray --disable-dev-tools \
--internal-urls 'outlook.office365.com/*' \
--single-instance https://mastodon.technology

Navigating Back and Forward

In a normal browser there are buttons to navigate back and forth through the history of a tab. On Nativefier this can be achieved by pressing the Alt-key and selecting View and Back - or Forward. This can also be achieved by pressing Alt+Left Arrow for going back and Alt+Right Arrow for going forwards.