This project has been merged into the electron/electron repository, and the electron module is now published to npm as part of the Electron release process.

If you're having trouble installing or using Electron, please file an issue on the electron/electron repo.

In the early days of Electron, back when it was still called atom-shell, there was no module published to npm, nor was there even an Electron team at GitHub. Electron was used primarly by the Atom team, and it was up to early adopters to manually download compiled binary builds of Electron for use in their apps.

In early 2015 Max Ogden created electron-download and electron-prebuilt, two npm modules to simplify the process of installing Electron. These tools quickly became de facto standards in the Electron community.

Shortly after electron-prebuilt was written, John Muhl created electron-prebuilt-updater, a Heroku app to publish the the prebuilt module to npm automatically as new versions of Electron were published on GitHub.

Fast forward to mid-2017, and GitHub now has a team working full-time on Electron. We are working towards a more regular release cadence, and are incrementally documenting and improving our release process. As we've added support for things like TypeScript definitions, it's been challenging to work these additions into the electron -> electron-prebuilt-updater -> electron-prebuilt release flow.

To reduce the number of moving parts in the release process, we imported the electron-prebuilt codebase into electron itself, and have preserved the git history to acknowledge the contributions of the 32 open-source community members who have helped improve electron-prebuilt over the years.