Meshcentral Desktop App 💻

This repository contains the Meshcentral Desktop App 🌐, a cross-platform desktop application for Meshcentral, built with Electron. The application allows users to connect to their Meshcentral server using a native desktop client.

App Architecture 🏗️

Here's a brief overview of the main components of this Electron application:

• main.js - The entry point of the application. It sets up the main window and the modal windows, handling their behavior and appearance.
• package.json - Defines the project dependencies and the build script.
• icons/ - This directory contains the icons for the application, generated using electron-icon-builder.

Customization ⚙️

The application loads a custom CSS to improve the scrollbar aesthetics and prevent overflow issues. You can modify this CSS in the main.js file to match your preferences.

Modals and External Links 🖇️

External links open in a new modal window rather than the default browser. This behavior is defined in the windowOpenHandler within main.js.

Getting Started 🚀

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites 📋

Before you can run or build the Meshcentral Desktop App, you must have the following installed:

• Node.js (which comes with npm).

Installing 🛠️

To get the app running locally, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to your local machine.
2. Navigate to the cloned repository's directory in your terminal.
3. Install the required npm packages by running:

npm install

Edit main.js ❗

Before running the app it's important that you edit the line const URL = "ENTER_YOUR_MESHCENTRAL_SERVER_URL_HERE"; at the very beginning of main.js.

For example:

const URL = "https://meshcentral.mydomain.com";

Running the App ▶️

Once you've installed the dependencies and have set your server url, you can start the app using:

npm start

This command will launch the Electron application and load the Meshcentral server page defined in the main.js file.

Building the App 🏗️

To build the application for production, run the following command:

npm run dist

This command will package the app into a distributable format.

Tests 🧪

I have successfully been running, building and installing the app on Windows 11 (23H2), MacOS 11.7.10 and MacOS 14.3.1.

Worth mentioning is that i have had serveral windows/sessions with Web-VNC and Web-RDP without any problems (so far) 🙌.

Contribution 👥

Feel free to fork the project and submit pull requests.

Acknowledgments 💖

• The Meshcentral team for providing the open-source management web portal.
• The Electron community for the framework to build cross-platform desktop apps.