Build size

[TomYeoman]

I like how minimal this repo is, when compared to something like https://github.com/electron-react-boilerplate/electron-react-boilerplate, however the build size is a real issue.

My builds are sitting at 500mb from a fresh clone, do you have any suggestions on reducing? It seems the main problem is that we're including all node_modules into the production builds that electron-builder is creating?.

[sprout2000]

@TomYeoman

500MB? That's weird. I think something is going wrong in your environment. Here is the result of the build at hand:

on macOS:

% ls -lh release
total 340376
-rw-r--r--@ 1 82M  8 30 06:20 Electron App-1.9.8-darwin-arm64.dmg
-rw-r--r--  1 88K  8 30 06:20 Electron App-1.9.8-darwin-arm64.dmg.blockmap
-rw-r--r--  1 79M  8 30 06:20 Electron App-1.9.8-darwin-arm64.zip
-rw-r--r--  1 85K  8 30 06:20 Electron App-1.9.8-darwin-arm64.zip.blockmap
-rw-r--r--  1 732B  8 30 06:20 builder-debug.yml
-rw-r--r--  1 406B  8 30 06:20 builder-effective-config.yaml
-rw-r--r--  1 531B  8 30 06:20 latest-mac.yml
drwxr-xr-x  3 96B  8 30 06:20 mac-arm64/

on Ubuntu Linux:

% ls -lh release
total 163M
-rw-r--r--  75M Aug 30 06:29 'Electron App-1.9.8-linux-amd64.snap'
-rwxr-xr-x  88M Aug 30 06:28 'Electron App-1.9.8-linux-x86_64.AppImage'*
-rw-rw-r--  730 Aug 30 06:29  builder-debug.yml
-rw-rw-r--  406 Aug 30 06:28  builder-effective-config.yaml
-rw-rw-r--  400 Aug 30 06:29  latest-linux.yml
drwxrwxr-x 4.0K Aug 30 06:28  linux-unpacked/

we're including all node_modules into the production builds that electron-builder is creating

electron-builder should have includeSubNodeModules set to false by default. Could you check your builder.ts again?

build({
  config: {
    files: ['dist/**/*'],
  },
});

And generally speaking, the only way to reduce the size of a production build is to remove unnecessary packages up front.

{
  "scripts": {
    "prebuild": "npm r rimraf wait-on --no-save"
  }
}

I recommend using ifdef-loader for further weight loss.

[sprout2000]

And also on Windows 11:

$ npm run build && npm run package
$ ls -lh release
total 154M
-rwxr-xr-x 1  65M Aug 30 09:57 'Electron App-1.9.8-installer.exe'*
-rw-r--r-- 1  71K Aug 30 09:57 'Electron App-1.9.8-installer.exe.blockmap'
-rw-r--r-- 1  89M Aug 30 09:57 'Electron App-1.9.8-win32-x64.zip'
-rw-r--r-- 1 6.8K Aug 30 09:57  builder-debug.yml
-rw-r--r-- 1  406 Aug 30 09:56  builder-effective-config.yaml
-rw-r--r-- 1  360 Aug 30 09:57  latest.yml
drwxr-xr-x 1    0 Aug 30 09:56  win-unpacked/

I would like you to try my other boiler plate if you like.