Chapter 15. Releasing and updating applications
This chapter covers
- Sending crash reports from Electron
- Sending reports of uncaught exceptions from Electron
- Creating a server to collect crash and exception reports
- Automatically pushing application updates to users
You’ve built your application, and you’re ready to distribute it to the world. You’ve prepared your announcement, and your cursor is hovering over the Publish button when—all of a sudden—your mind begins to race with some very important questions: What if it doesn’t work on all platforms as you expected? What if there is a bug you haven’t encountered yet? What if you need to push out a new version of the application to your users?
These concerns are all valid. The good news is that Electron has you covered on each front. In this chapter, we cover how to collect crash reports and—in the event you receive an unexpectedly large number of them—how to push an update to all of the users that currently have the application installed on their system.
Despite how good your skills as a developer are, your application is going to have bugs. Some users report them, but many others suffer in silence. Even among the users who report bugs, it can be difficult to determine how common a given issue is among your user base as a whole. Crash reporting is critical for discovering what types of problems occur and at what frequency your users are experiencing them.