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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

Afterwards if a Linux-based system is used the created app can be added to the path. An example for this is the following command which links the applicatoin to a specifically created directory.

ln -s mastodon-linux-x64/mastodon ~/.local/bin/links

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.

Troubleshooting

This section focusses on various errors that can appear by using Nativefier.

Skia shader compilation error When Starting an Application

This section is based on a GitHub issue by RJVB.

When starting an application that has been set up using nativefier it is possible that the error Skia shader compilation error or a similar error regarding Skia can occur. An easy way to fix this is by clearing the GPU cache which can be found inside the ~/.config directory. For example a nativefied app named mtg-companion can be found in the directory ~/.config/mtg-companion-nativefier-8fcad7 and its GPU cache inside the directory named ~/.config/mtg-companion-nativefier-8fcad7/GPUCache. The whole directory GPUCache can just be moved or removed to clear the cache.