Friday, October 31, 2014 at 8:14 PM

Getting Hello Node-Webkit to work

I've tried five different ways to get started with Node-Webkit, but haven't gotten the hello world app to work yet. I really want to get going with this, so I thought I'd just detail the steps I took, and provide the actual example app, and maybe someone else will tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thanks in advance.

These are the instructions I was following in this narrative.

  1. I am running Mac OS X 10.8.2.

  2. Downloaded the 64-bit binary from the GitHub site.

  3. Opened the zip file with the Mac's Archive Utility. Renamed the folder to nw.

  4. Created a new folder called myNodeWebkitApps, and copied the nw folder into it.

  5. Created a new Hello World folder, containing two files: package.json and index.html.

  6. Using the Finder right-click menu, I selected both files, and created a zip archive containing both files, but not the containing folder. I renamed the file app.nw.

  7. I opened the node-webkit app. Noted that the file type or app.nw changed, as the docs said it would.

  8. I double-clicked on app.nw. I do not see the Hello World message, as predicted by the docs. I just see the default window display. Screen shot.

There don't appear to be any debugging commands I can use to figure out what went wrong. There were no error messages.

Update: Problem solved

Simon Olsberg left a comment below that had the answer.

It seems a recent update of Node-Webkit broke the Mac version? Going back to 0.8.6 solved the problem. Now I'm getting my Hello World message in the window.

You can get 0.8.6 as of this writing (Nov 1, 2014) from the download page.

Update: Follow-up post

BTW, see the follow-up post, about how to organize the app I'm working on. Looking for more good advice.


Last built: Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 5:50 PM

By Dave Winer, Friday, October 31, 2014 at 8:14 PM. This aggression will not stand.