Developer Blog: Cardstack Electron App

How to run Cardstack on a local machine

Today, we discuss our initial approach to our Electron App.

Progressive Decentralization

At Cardstack, we believe in the idea of progressive decentralization. That means people should be able to enjoy a consistent user experience running Cardstack on a centralized, cloud provider (i.e. AWS); something that’s fully decentralized (i.e. a user’s own local machine); or something in between.

But being portable and decentralized requires more than just access to the source code. You need a practical way to set up the right environment for the code to run.

Members of the Cardstack Team meet with Electron app expert Alex Blom on June 14, 2018.

Cardstack on the Desktop

We’re taking an important step by building an Electron app for Cardstack, which will eventually be able to encapsulate Cardstack as a desktop application. Last week, the Cardstack team met with Alex Blom, the primary maintainer of Corber and an Electron app expert, to discuss our approach.

To develop the Cardstack Electron app, we are starting by encapsulating an older, open-sourced tutorial app that we developed in 2017 to show how the Cardstack architecture could be used to create CMS-based web applications.

Later, our work on Electron will allow us to ship Cardspace, a token-operated content environment for experimenting with Card based UX design.