Building an ARDI-Powered Electron App

We've provided a basic template for creating ARDI-powered Electron apps.

You are not required to use this template - you can create anything you want with ARDI data - but it can help you get started quickly.

NOTE - This template is extremely bare-bones and is designed to help people build simple, pure-Javascript applications that focus on data visualisation. Our template isn't designed with React, Vue or other frameworks in mind.

Firstly, make sure Node.JS is installed on your development system, along with npm (the Node Package Manager).

In a terminal/command prompt, go to the folder you'd like to create your project in.

Type the following, where 'my-app' will be name and folder of the app you want to create.

npx create-electron-app@latest my-app

This will take a few moments to install of the required files.

Next, you can extract our Electron Template into your 'src' folder.

To avoid confusion, we've changed the default 'js' file that runs when you start your Electron application. Open the package.json file and change the value of main to 'src/main.js' instead of 'src/index.js'.

You can now test things out by going into to your project folder in your terminal/command prompt session and typing…

npm start

Next, you'll want to know how to customise the app you've made.