I was developing an electron application that required to auto-start when the computer is booted and started up and it had to be cross-platform and automatic. So when the computer starts the program should run and there should be no setup required, once the user launches the application it should auto-start upon login.

To solve this problem I tried various methods and none of them worked reliably until I came across a very useful library by name of “auto-launch”.

To install the application run :

npm install auto-launch

To configure it, edit the main.js file of your electron application and add the following code:

var AutoLaunch = require('auto-launch');
var autoLauncher = new AutoLaunch({
    name: "MyApp"
});
// Checking if autoLaunch is enabled, if not then enabling it.
autoLauncher.isEnabled().then(function(isEnabled) {
  if (isEnabled) return;
   autoLauncher.enable();
}).catch(function (err) {
  throw err;
});

The name parameter is optional and you can put any name in there but I recommend specifying the name parameter because if not specified AutoLaunch does not work correctly.

Auto-Launch also provide other configuration options, you can check out the full documentation at it’s Github page https://github.com/Teamwork/node-auto-launch.

That’s it! Let me know if you have any questions in the comment section.