electron-make-pacman 📦

A professional Electron Forge Maker plugin and a standalone CLI tool. It generates fully native and reliable .pkg.tar.zst (Pacman) packages for Arch Linux and its derivatives (Manjaro, EndeavourOS, etc.). Unlike traditional builders, it directly utilizes Arch Linux's official makepkg packaging system as a child process under the hood to completely comply with Arch Linux packaging standards.

🚀 Features

Dual Usage: Integrate it seamlessly as a maker into your Electron Forge configuration, or use it independently as a CLI tool via npx electron-make-pacman.
Dual-Build Support: Compiled in both CommonJS (.cjs) and ES Modules (.js - ESM) standards, ensuring full compatibility with both modern and legacy Node.js projects.
Advanced Desktop Integration: Automatically configures the .desktop launcher file, embedding properties like Categories and StartupWMClass, and seamlessly handles system icon transitions.
Optimal Security Compliance: Automatically applies the required setUID (4755) permission fixes for the chrome-sandbox (an Electron requirement) during the makepkg process.
Pino Logger: Offers a standardized, colorful, and highly readable logging infrastructure via pino and pino-pretty for debugging and environment communication.
AUR & Remote Source Mode: Features an aurOnly option to bypass standard packaging. Instead of building from local files, it dynamically pulls your app from a GitHub Release URL, generating only the .SRCINFO file to prepare an Arch User Repository (AUR) structure.
Automated Repo Management: Capable of automatically executing repo-add to register your newly compiled .pkg.tar.zst into a specified custom Pacman repository database.

🛠️ Installation

npm install --save-dev electron-make-pacman

Note: In order for this package to successfully generate Pacman packages, the makepkg utility (Arch base system) must be installed on your host machine.

💻 1. Usage in Forge Config (Electron Forge Integration)

Add the following configuration to your forge.config.js, forge.config.cjs, or forge.config.ts:

// For CJS projects: const MakerPacman = require('electron-make-pacman').default;
import MakerPacman from 'electron-make-pacman';

export default {
  // ... other forge configs
  makers: [
    new MakerPacman({
      options: {
        depends: ['gtk3', 'nss', 'libxss', 'libxtst', 'alsa-lib'], // Arch dependencies
        icon: '/absolute/path/to/app-icon.png',
        desktopCategories: ['Utility', 'Development'],
        // aurOnly: true, // Only generates .SRCINFO for the AUR without building the package
        // githubReleaseUrl: 'https://github.com/user/repo/releases/download/v1.0.0/app-linux.tar.gz' 
        // repoDb: '/var/lib/pacman/custom.db.tar.gz' // Automatically add to a local pacman repo
      }
    }),
  ]
};

To run the maker, simply use your standard forge package command:

npm run make

💻 2. CLI Usage (Standalone Packager)

If you have already packaged your application into a prebuilt uncompressed folder (like dist/linux-unpacked), you can trigger the plugin via its CLI:

Automatically searches for standard output folders like 'dist/linux-unpacked' or 'out/'

npx electron-make-pacman

Specify a direct path to the unpacked application folder

npx electron-make-pacman ./build-output/my-app-linux-x64

Package the application by parsing the configuration from an external JSON file

npx electron-make-pacman ./build-output --config ./pacman-config.json

Example pacman-config.json:

{
  "options": {
    "depends": ["gtk3", "nss", "alsa-lib"],
    "icon": "./assets/icon.png",
    "desktopCategories": ["Network", "Utility"]
  }
}

📂 Project Structure (What is What?)

The project is primarily driven by four core modules inside the src/ directory:

MakerPacman.ts (Entry Point & Electron Binding):

The main class file extending @electron-forge/maker-base. It introduces the Maker to the Electron Forge system, performs platform validations (ensuring it only runs on Linux platforms), and dispatches Forge events to the packager.

packager.ts (Orchestrator & Controller):

The primary controller responsible for creating temporary build directories (tempDir), transporting icons, copying application files, and sequentially spawning the makepkg sub-process. It enforces environment variables like PKGDEST to strictly control where makepkg places its resulting archives.

pkgbuilder.ts (Text & PKGBUILD Generator):

The engine responsible for generating the PKGBUILD string output according to Arch Linux syntaxes. It orchestrates shell formatting strings to install your application systematically (/opt/[app-name]), configure the .desktop shortcuts (/usr/share/applications), parse Git URLs, and configure symlinks.

cli.ts (Command Line Interface):

The executed Node binary that steps in for un-forged standalone environments. It parses terminal arguments, dynamically detects compiled Electron unpacked app directories, processes external JSON configs, and initiates the pipeline towards packager.ts.

logger.ts:

A robust Pino structure bringing formatted, colorful standard outputs directly to the CLI for deep and readable integrations across the environment.

⚙️ How It Works Under the Hood

Initialization: Upon being triggered, it creates a sanitized temporary directory structure: /tmp/pacman-[pkg-name]-[timestamp].
Staging: Your unpacked Electron app is recursively copied into /src/app within the temporary directory.
Generation: pkgbuilder.ts maps your system architecture architecture (e.g., x86_64) against your provided MakerOptions and generates a highly specific PKGBUILD file containing step-by-step Bash sequences intended for the Arch package manager.
Execution: packager.ts spawns a background child process calling makepkg -cfd --noconfirm.
Packaging: The makepkg utility scopes into the temporary directory, assesses permissions (dynamically fixing chrome-sandbox via chmod 4755), and successfully builds the standard .pkg.tar.zst payload.
Delivery: Make Pacman parses the final .pkg.tar.zst from makepkg, moves it into your requested Forge out/make directory, and cleanly disposes of the /tmp environment variables.

Author: Osman Beyhan