electron/docs/tutorial/application-distribution.md

Application distribution

To distribute your app with atom-shell, you should name the folder of your app as app, and put it under atom-shell's resources directory (on OS X it is Atom.app/Contents/Resources/, and on Linux and Windows it is resources/), like this:

On Mac OS X:

atom-shell/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html

On Windows and Linux:

atom-shell/resources/app
├── package.json
├── main.js
└── index.html

Then execute Atom.app (or atom on Linux, and atom.exe on Windows), and atom-shell will start as your app. The atom-shell directory would then be your distribution that should be delivered to final users.

Packaging your app into a file

Apart from shipping your app by copying all its sources files, you can also package your app into an asar archive to avoid exposing your app's source code to users.

To use an asar archive to replace the app folder, you need to rename the archive to app.asar, and put it under atom-shell's resources directory like bellow, and atom-shell will then try read the archive and start from it.

On Mac OS X:

atom-shell/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/
└── app.asar

On Windows and Linux:

atom-shell/resources/
└── app.asar

More details can be found in Application packaging.

Renaming atom-shell for your app

Renaming by rebuilding

The best way to rename atom-shell is to change the atom.gyp file, then build from source. Open up atom.gyp and change the two lines:

'project_name': 'atom',
'product_name': 'Atom',

Once you make the change, re-run script/bootstrap.py then run the command:

script/build.py -c Release -t whatever_you_chose_for_project_name

Renaming with grunt-build-atom-shell

Manually checking out atom-shell's code and rebuilding could be complicated, so a Grunt task has been created that will handle this automatically, grunt-build-atom-shell.

This task will automatically handle editing the .gyp file, building from source, then rebuilding your app's native Node modules to match the new executable name.

Renaming the downloaded binaries

If you don't care about the executable name on Windows or the helper process name on OS X, you can simply rename the downloaded binaries, and there is also a grunt task that can download atom-shell for your current platform automatically, grunt-download-atom-shell.

Windows

You can not rename the atom.exe otherwise native modules will not load. But you can edit the executable's icon and other information with tools like rcedit or ResEdit.

OS X

You can rename Atom.app to whatever you want, and you also have to rename the CFBundleDisplayName, CFBundleIdentifier and CFBundleName fields in following manifest files if they have the keys:

• Atom.app/Contents/Info.plist
• Atom.app/Contents/Frameworks/Atom Helper.app/Contents/Info.plist

Linux

You can rename the atom executable to whatever you want.