Tag: electron

How I Fixed: Electron builder rcedit-x64.exe”: file does not exist

This is likely a very specific issue to my setup, but on the off chance this helps someone, I figured I would share it.

During Electron builds, whilst building for Windows (NSIS) using GitLab CI on Windows, I kept hitting the following error, causing the build to fail:

   ⨯ cannot execute  cause=exec: "C:\\Windows\\TEMP\\electron-builder-cache\\winCodeSign\\winCodeSign-2.6.0\\rcedit-x64.exe": file does not exist
                     command='C:\Windows\TEMP\electron-builder-cache\winCodeSign\winCodeSign-2.6.0\rcedit-x64.exe' 'C:\gitlab-ci-runner\builds\3RB9ixUo\0\affiliatestatstracker\app\release\win-unpacked\Affiliate Stats Tracker.exe' --set-version-string FileDescription 'Affiliate Stats Tracker' --set-version-string ProductName 'Affiliate Stats Tracker' --set-version-string LegalCopyright 'Copyright © 2020 A6Software' --set-file-version 1.10.0.111 --set-product-version 1.10.0.111 --set-version-string InternalName 'Affiliate Stats Tracker' --set-version-string OriginalFilename '' --set-version-string CompanyName A6Software --set-icon 'C:\gitlab-ci-runner\builds\3RB9ixUo\0\affiliatestatstracker\app\release\.icon-ico\icon.ico'
                     workingDir=
   • Above command failed, retrying 0 more times
 error Command failed with exit code 1.

The fix to this is to ensure the GitLab CI Runner is running as an admin user.

In my case, this means starting Power Shell using “run as administrator”, and then stopping / restarting the GitLab CI Runner.

My issue was caused, it would seem, by running the runner outside of the administrator mode / in regular Power Shell. I don’t use Windows much, sue me.

Anyway, another debug step on this one is to browse to the GitLab CI runner directory, go into the builds directory, right to the dir where GitLab CI left all the files after the previous run failed. From there, you should be able to manually build the project. If you can, likely you have the same issue I had as above.

Like I say, a very specific issue. But hopefully it helps someone, at some point.

How To Get Variables From package.json In Your JS / TS Code

Let’s say you have a bit of information inside package.json that you’d like to use somewhere in your code. An example of this in my case is the version string which I have to set for Electron to then generate the new file name for the “built” version of my app.

I figured if I’m specifying the version in package.json, I could display that value in the app footer. This would then, hopefully, help with a variety of first step debugging processes / help / support requests. It’s a quick visual check to ensure the user is on the latest version.

Anyway, this is one of them things that doesn’t come up for me that often, and when it does, I tend to forget how to do it.

import { version as appVersion } from '../package.json';

const Footer = () => {
  return (
    <footer>
      <p>
        v{appVersion} © 2019 -{' '}
        {new Date().getFullYear()} A6 Software Ltd. All rights reserved.
      </p>
    </footer>
  );
};

(Ugh, seems WordPress code formatting has some … issues, shall we say, at present)

Pretty straightforward.

package.json is not a special case here, even though it might seem like it would be. This is how you can get a value from any JSON file.

This may not work immediately, it really depends on how your project is set up.