How to Develop Neutralinojs Apps

Neutralinojs is a framework for building portable, lightweight, and cross-platform desktop applications. The apps you make with Neutralinojs will work on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Web. In other words, you can run your Neutralinojs app in a native window component, or you can run it inside your favorite web browser.

Moreover, you can deploy your Neutralinojs app as a web application as well. If you publish your Neutralinojs app as a web app with the cloud mode, everyone can access it via the internet.

As you know, the Neutralinojs framework supports three modes: window mode, browser mode, and cloud mode. Check out the following example use cases for each mode of Neutralinojs.

Window mode

Developers can create any lightweight desktop application. (A code editor, task management app, etc.) These apps will consume lesser resources compared to Chromium-Node-based frameworks.

Browser mode

Build web apps with native features overriding browser sandbox. For example, implementing a web terminal program that executes commands on your computer from the web browser.

Cloud mode

Building web apps to control your hardware or virtual machines. For example, building an app to run commands on the computer via the mobile phone.

Installing neu CLI

You need to install the neu CLI to make Neutralinojs apps. Run the following command on your terminal to install the neu CLI.

$ npm install -g @neutralinojs/neu

Creating a new app

Like any other CLI, the create command will scaffold a fresh project for you.

$ neu create myApp

Running your application

myApp is the application’s binary name. The above command automatically creates a simple desktop application. Therefore, you can run the following command to run it.

$ cd myApp
$ neu run

If you would like to reload your application automatically while you are modifying source files, the following command will help you.

$ neu listen

In fact, developers can use any frontend framework to develop Neutralinojs apps. Also, they can use plain HTML and vanilla JavaScript as well. Our YouTube channel has tutorials for React and Angular frontend frameworks.

Building and releasing your application

In the Neutralinojs framework, building the final binaries is blazing fast because it uses pre-built binaries. The final application package contains binaries for each platform and a resource file. When you are releasing your application for users, you also can share the portable application package. On the other hand, you can make your own installers, or you can publish to application registries such as Snapcraft as well.

Start developing lightweight apps with Neutralinojs today. Ask questions on StackOverflow with neutralinojs tag if you face any development issues. Stay tuned with our Roadmap for 2021.

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