Upgrading Electron from 7 to 12

Hi, it's Takuya. I'm making a Markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop with Electron.
I upgraded Electron from 7 to 12 in this project, and here are some troubleshootings.

Upgrading packages

npm i electron@12.0.0 electron-rebuild@latest

In case node-abi is not the latest, upgrade it:

npm update node-abi --depth 2

require() is not defined

There is the following breaking change:

• Changed the default value of contextIsolation to true. #27949

It overrides nodeIntegration option. So, you have to specify options like so:

webPreferences: {
  contextIsolation: false,
  enableRemoteModule: true,
  nodeIntegration: true,
  nodeIntegrationInWorker: true,
  webviewTag: true
}

remote module deprecation

There is another breaking change:

• Deprecated the remote module. It is replaced by @electron/remote. #25293

You should fix like so:

// Deprecated in Electron 12:
const { BrowserWindow } = require('electron').remote
// Replace with:
const { BrowserWindow } = require('@electron/remote')

// In the main process:
require('@electron/remote/main').initialize()

Failed to serialize arguments

My app calls a function of the main process.
It passed a BrowserWindow object as its parameter and that causes the error: Failed to serialize arguments.
I replaced that code to use browser window ID instead.

Ubuntu gets blank screen on VM

• Electron >=10 does not work on Ubuntu 18 under Parallels vm 16 · Issue #26061 · electron/electron

Apparently, it only happens on Paralells VM.

You can run the app by appending --disable-gpu option like so:

npm start -- --disable-gpu

---

Hope that helps!

Comments

[Tom Lienard]

Hello, thanks for sharing this. I had a question, do v8 snapshots work for you? I tried with Electron 9 and it's working fine, but on Electron 11 or 12 (to support M1 macs), the global variable snapshotResult is not defined.

[Takuya Matsuyama]

I have the same issue :( Did you report that to the community?

[Tom Lienard]

Reported at github.com/electron/mksnapshot/iss..., but I saw that you got here too. No response from the maintainer since about a month :/

[Takuya Matsuyama]

Hope they'll give us a hint :)