How to Install and Set Up Proton Native on Windows 10

React, the popular JavaScript library has an imperative role in web development. React Native, a framework to build cross-platform mobile applications is also based on React library. So if we learned React JS, we can work as a web/mobile app developer. But can we build a native desktop application using React? Yes! using Proton Native. Here we will learn to install and set up Proton Native on Windows 10.

What Proton Native does for desktop app development is similar to what React Native has done for mobile. It uses native components to build native cross-platform desktop applications.

There are some other JavaScript frameworks to build native cross-platform desktop applications like Electron JS, Meteor, NW JS, etc. We can integrate React with these frameworks also. But Proton Native is based on React as default.

Steps to Install Proton Native on Windows 10

So here we are going to discuss the steps in installing Proton Native on our Windows system.

1. Install Nodejs

Node.js actually provides a runtime environment to execute JavaScript code from outside a browser. NPM, the default package manager for Nodejs is used for managing and sharing the packages for any JavaScript projects. Proton native uses Node.js and NPM for the management of dependencies and runtime.

In this tutorial, we are going to install Proton native using the Node Package Manager(NPM).

So first, it needs to install Nodejs on our system. NPM will be installed with Nodejs. The current stable version of Node.js can be downloaded and installed from the official website that is given below.

https://nodejs.org

You can see two versions on the main page. The stable version and the latest version. The stable version is recommended for most users. Currently, 12.16.1 is the stable version of Nodejs and we need to download it.

It downloads an EXE file to your system. Now install it on your system. If there is any doubt, the screenshots I provided below will help you.

1.1 Start the installation wizard

The first step is to start the installation wizard by running the installation file.

1.2 Accept the license agreement

Now accept the license agreement and click Next.

1.3 Choose the installation directory

AS default, Node.js installed in the Program Files directory. If you are preferring another, it can be chosen from this step.

1.4 Select the features

We can customize the features to be installed with Node.js. But here, we don’t need to bother about it. Just click Next.

1.5 Install tools for Native Modules

In this step, you can optionally install tools like Python2, Visual Studio Build Tools, etc. Just skip and click Next.

1.6 Start installation

Now click the Install button to start Node.js installation.

7. Finish the installation

After a successful installation close the installation wizard by clicking the Finish button.

Now, verify Node.js and NPM are installed on our system. Open Command Prompt and check the Node and npm versions with the below commands. You can see the versions as it shows in the below image.

Note:- If you don’t know how to open Command Prompt, press the Windows key on your keyboard and search for “cmd”.

node -v
npm -v 

2. Install Proton Native

We have installed Nodejs.  Now we can install Proton Native using Node Package Manager(NPM).

npm install -g create-proton-app

3. Creating a New Proton Native Application

After successful installation of Proton Native, we can now create a new project using create-proton-app.

create-proton-app awesome-project

npx create-proton-app awesome-project

4. Running Our App

Now enter into the project we have created and start our application with the commands below.

cd awesome-project
npm start

This will open a new application window on our windows system.

TechoTip: We recommend using Visual Studio code as the source-code editor for working with Proton Native projects.

Summary

So we have learned the steps to install Proton Native on Windows 10 using Node.js and NPM. We also created a simple “Hello World” app using it.