Nativefier is a tool that allows us to turn any website into a desktop application simply by invoking a command.
The application is designed to convert frequently visited web pages into desktop applications, making them very convenient to use.
It is also very useful (in my opinion, even more useful) if we want to generate a small executable of our web application for alternative distribution (for example, if you want to make yourself a luisllamas.exe 😜)
Under the hood, Nativefier uses Electron technology to create a Windows, macOS, or Linux application that displays a specific web page.
That is, basically Nativefier creates for us a “small browser” with Chromium technology, which displays the web page we want.
How to Use Nativefier
One of Nativefier’s strongest points is that it is really simple. We just need to add the utility to NodeJS by doing,
npm install -g nativefier
Once installed, we only need to run this command to convert any website,
nativefier “https://mi-aplicacion-web.com” —name “Mi Aplicación”
With this command, we would have created a desktop application from the web application at https://my-web-app.com, with the name “Mi Aplicación”.
We only need to specify the URL of the application and the customization options we require. It certainly couldn’t be easier.
We have a large number of options we can use during its execution. For example, we can choose for the window to be in fullscreen mode, “always on top”, among others. You can find all the available options in the API documentation.
Nativefier is cross-platform and compatible with Windows (.exe), macOS, and Linux. It is Open Source and all the documentation and code is available in the project repository https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier/
