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3. Compile the app

Important

You'll need to re-invoke your build system any time you change the app's code. At this time Conveyor won't do it for you.

  • If packaging a template project, run ./gradlew jar to download the Gradle build tool and compile the app to a portable JAR. Otherwise, invoke your build system of choice.
  • Run npm install to download Electron for development purposes.

In a real project you would probably use webpack, vite or some other packer tool to do tree shaking and reduce the number of files. Because there are so many different ways to set up JavaScript projects, this template gives you the most minimal setup possible and lets you configure the rest as you prefer. The generated conveyor.conf will import any files matching *.{js,json,css,html} at the top level of your project.

Native apps can be written in any language that produces a binary, but the template uses C++. Native apps must be compiled for each OS you wish to target. Getting access to different build machines is more work than necessary for this tutorial, so you should now edit conveyor.conf and edit the machines = [ ... ] line, changing the contents of the list to reflect which platform(s) you're using and will compile the app for.

Instructions for how to build are in the README.md file. It's a conventional CMake build system of the kind widely used in the C++ ecosystem, so we won't go into details here.

  • Edit the machines key in the conveyor.conf file.
  • Follow the build instructions in README.md to create the binaries.
  • Use flutter build {windows,macos,linux} --release on each platform as appropriate.