cannot find in electron render process

Question

I am using electron v1.2.3 with react js and es6 (with babel-preset-es2015).
I have a module where I need to import the app module in the render process. But I got this error:

Cannot read property 'app' of undefined

Here is the module that I need to import:

const app = require('electron').remote.app;
const userData = app.getPath('userData');

var nconf = require('nconf').file({file: userData + '/settings.json'});


function saveSettings(settingKey, settingValue) {
    nconf.set(settingKey, settingValue);
    nconf.save();
}
function readSettings(settingKey) {
    nconf.load();
    return nconf.get(settingKey);
}

module.exports = {
    saveSettings: saveSettings,
    readSettings: readSettings
};

I also have tried with

const app = require('electron').remote.require('app');

Still i get the error:

Cannot read property 'require' of undefined

Not sure is the webpack configuration matters. I am refer to this answer to setting up the webpack configuration.

module.exports = {
  context: __dirname + '/app',
  entry: './entry.js',
  node: {
    fs: "empty"
  },
  output: {
    filename: 'bundle.js',
    path: __dirname + '/build',
    publicPath: 'http://localhost:8080/build/'
  },

  module: {
    loaders: [
      {
        test: /\.jsx?$/,
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        loader: 'react-hot',
    },
      {
        test: /\.js$/,
        loader: "babel-loader",
        exclude: /node_modules/ ,
        query: { presets:['es2015','react'] }
      }
    ]
  },
  externals: [
    (function () {
      var IGNORES = [
        'electron'
      ];
      return function (context, request, callback) {
        if (IGNORES.indexOf(request) >= 0) {
          return callback(null, "require('" + request + "')");
        }
        return callback();
      };
    })()
  ]
};