Possible to add CLI arg to created shortcut?

[Nantris]

Example use case is that our app starts hidden with only a system tray icon upon startup, but when launched from the shortcut manually I'd like to have it appear visible.

[mmaietta]

This sounds like functionality that would need to be via electron APIs? I'm not sure how it could be implemented from our side. IIRC, we only pass CLI args to the installer during auto-update app restarts.

[Nantris]

Thanks for your reply @mmaietta!

I'm not sure if I was clear enough - I implemented yargs on our end to handle a --start-visible flag, but there's no easy way to modify the shortcuts the installer makes on each platform to include that (and now that I think of it, I suppose this is primarily on Windows because I don't think the app launcher on macOS can even have custom args? And AppImage doesn't produce a shortcut to my knowledge)

In any case, I assume that's not something that could be finagled via the installer logic as it currently exists?

[mmaietta]

Looks like it may be possible to configure CreateShortCut, but I'm not familiar with the nsis CreateShortCut scripting command.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26804284/manage-shortcuts-arguments-for-nsis-createshortcut-method-via-cmake

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aelectron-userland%2Felectron-builder+CreateShortCut&type=code

Would you be willing to investigate that portion and get back to me? If args can be provided, then we can create a config property to allow those to be passed to the installer.nsh script

I suppose this is primarily on Windows because I don't think the app launcher on macOS can even have custom args? And AppImage doesn't produce a shortcut to my knowledge

This is correct.

[mmaietta]

Looks like it may be simple to add actually, but I'm really unequipped for nsis scripting.
https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Reference/CreateShortCut

@beyondkmp would you be willing to take a look at this when you have a chance?

[Nantris]

A quick reading looks like the relevant part of the code to pass CLI args would be the first empty string below with the args:

CreateShortCut "$newStartMenuLink" "$appExe" "" "$appExe" 0 "" "" "${APP_DESCRIPTION}"

But unfortunately I know even less about NSIS myself so how to populate that is beyond me. This is a "nice-to-have" for us and I'm bogged down with bugs and stuff (and aren't all us coders?)