electron preload not working when building app (windows)

Question

While the preload script loads ok when developing yarn start

It does not on builds yarn make

Unable to load preload script:

  const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 1800,
    height: 1600,
    webPreferences: {
      nodeIntegration: true,
      sandbox: false,
      preload: path.join(app.getAppPath(), 'preload.js')
    },
  })

Is there any evident reason for that?

Answer 1

Several questions and issues about this one, such as

• https://gist.github.com/bbudd/2a246a718b7757584950b4ed98109115
• preload script not loaded in packaged app
• https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-forge/issues/1590
• Can't use static files in electron forge
• https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-webpack/issues/321
• Why does preload.js return "ERROR: module not found"?

The answer is this one https://stackoverflow.com/a/67176486/826815, adapted for js, also described in the docs https://www.electronforge.io/config/plugins/webpack#project-setup

const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
  webPreferences: {
    preload: MAIN_WINDOW_PRELOAD_WEBPACK_ENTRY,
  }
});

              "entryPoints": [
                {
                  "html": "./src/index.html",
                  "js": "./src/renderer.js",
                  "name": "main_window",
                  "preload": {
                    "js": "./src/preload.js"
                  }
                }

Being preload.js in the /scr/ folder, and checking that afterwards it is present in the /out/ folder