wtf is electron-builder?

Electron-builder takes your Electron desktop app and turns it into a polished installer, the kind users download, double-click, and follow a setup wizard to install. Instead of handing people a raw app folder, you hand them a .dmg file on Mac or a Setup.exe on Windows, complete with your custom icon and branding. The project is marked as work-in-progress, but the core workflow is already there. It works as a companion to electron-packager, which is the tool that first bundles your app into a runnable desktop application for a given platform. Once electron-packager produces that packaged app, this tool steps in and wraps it into a proper installer. You configure it with a JSON file where you specify things like the installer title, app icon, and (on Mac) the background image and layout of the install window. Then you run a single command pointing at your packaged app, your platform target, and that config file, and it spits out the installer file. Someone building a cross-platform desktop app with Electron would use this when they are ready to distribute. For example, a small team shipping a Mac and Windows version of their product could use it to generate both installers from an OS X machine, so they do not need a separate Windows build environment just to produce a Windows installer. There are some prerequisites worth noting. Building a Windows installer from Mac or Linux requires Wine (a compatibility layer) and NSIS, the installer system that powers the Windows setup files. The README notes that the project has only been tested on OS X so far, and Windows support is still being refined. The configuration is intentionally file-based rather than command-line-flag-based, because the authors felt the options were complex enough to warrant a dedicated config file.