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PowerSync + Electron in main process

This example shows how the PowerSync Node.js client SDK can be used in the main process of an Electron app.

The purpose of this example is to highlight specific build configurations that enable this setup. In particular:

  1. In src/main/index.ts, a PowerSyncDatabase is created. PowerSync uses node workers to speed up database queries. This worker is part of the @powersync/node package and wouldn't be copied into the resulting Electron app by default. For this reason, this example has its own src/main/worker.ts loaded with new URL('./worker.ts', import.meta.url).
  2. In addition to the worker, PowerSync requires access to a SQLite extension providing sync functionality. This file is also part of the @powersync/node package and is the prebuilt release asset (for example powersync_x64.dll, libpowersync_x64.dylib or libpowersync_x64.so) depending on the operating system and architecture. We use the copy-webpack-plugin package to make sure a copy of that file is available to the main process, and load it in the custom src/main/worker.ts.
  3. The get() and getAll() methods are exposed to the renderer process with an IPC channel.

To see it in action:

  1. cd into this directory.
  2. Run pnpm install.
  3. Copy .env.local.template to .env.local, and complete the environment variables. You can generate a temporary development token, or leave blank to test with local-only data. The example works with the schema from the PowerSync + Supabase tutorial.
  4. In this mono-repo, you'll have to run ./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild once to make sure better-sqlite3 was compiled with Electron's toolchain. Sometimes that doesn't work, you can also go to node_modules/better-sqlite3 and manually run HOME=~/.electron-gyp node-gyp rebuild --target=37.0.0 --arch=arm64 --dist-url=https://electronjs.org/headers (or --arch=x64 depending on your machine).
  5. Finally, run pnpm start.

Apart from the build setup, this example is purposefully kept simple. To make sure PowerSync is working, you can run await powersync.get('SELECT powersync_rs_version()'); in the DevTools console. A result from that query implies that the PowerSync was properly configured.

For more details, see the documentation for the PowerSync node package and check other examples:

  • example-node: A Node.js CLI example that connects to PowerSync to run auto-updating queries.
  • example-electron: An Electron example that runs PowerSync in the render process instead of in the main one.