Electron-builder: App insta-crashes when application name doesn't match package.json's `appName` field.

[benjaffe]

• v20.40.2, but I also tried this on the latest version.

N/A

• Mac with Electron v4.1.4

My app insta-crashes when the application name doesn't match package.json's appName field, and the crash report isn't helpful in debugging.

I'm changing the name of the application using the builder programmatically, in order to create identical builds with different icons, to indicate beta / rc / final builds to make dogfooding easier. I found that my app built successfully on Jenkins, but when I opened it, it insta-crashed with a crash report that had no useful information. I realized after a lot of poking around, that I had to change the appName field in package.json by overriding the value with config.extraMetadata.productName. This seemed simple, but since I had an invalid filename character in my name (I had a /), the build process sanitizes those out of the app name, but they remain in the appName field.

Ideally, if the app has to crash because of a name mismatch, it should give some sort of information about why it crashed. I eventually got it working, but lost at least a day to this, and would love for nobody to go through what I did. 😆

It might be as easy as adding some error handling around whatever code uses the application name and appName, and throwing a clear error.

Thanks for your work on Electron. It's really fantastic ❤️

[stale[bot]]

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[benjaffe]

Yes, unless something has been done to address it, this is still relevant.