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Electron 2.0 and Beyond - Semantic Versioning

· One min read
groundwater
groundwater

A new major version of Electron is in the works, and with it some changes to our versioning strategy. As of version 2.0.0, Electron will strictly adhere to Semantic Versioning.

This change means you'll see the major version bump more often, and it will usually be a major update to Chromium. Patch releases will also be more stable, as they will now only contain bug fixes with no new features.

Major Version Increments

  • Chromium version updates
  • Node.js major version updates
  • Electron breaking API changes

Minor Version Increments

  • Node.js minor version updates
  • Electron non-breaking API changes

Patch Version Increments

  • Node.js patch version updates
  • fix-related chromium patches
  • Electron bug fixes

Because Electron's semver ranges will now be more meaningful, we recommend installing Electron using npm's default --save-dev flag, which will prefix your version with ^, keeping you safely up to date with minor and patch updates:

npm install --save-dev electron

For developers interested only in bug fixes, you should use the tilde semver prefix e.g. ~2.0.0, which which will never introduce new features, only fixes to improve stability.

For more details, see electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/electron-versioning.