nativefier -- turn web apps into native desktop apps

when i research a topic on google, i usually open new tabs for each result i find interesting and then go through those tabs to collect the information i am looking for. this means, that i often end up with lots and lots of open tabs which in turn means, that web-apps such as microsoft teams or whatsapp web get lost in the jungle of open tabs in my browser. that's why i prefer to have native apps for those apps that i use most.. but that's not always available, especially for linux.

so often i am left with the web app only.. and that's where nativefier comes into play. this tool uses Electron in the background to create native desktop apps out of web apps you have access to.

to get started you first need to install a recent version of node.js. often distros come with too old versions. you can follow this guide without the yarn part.

now that this is done, it's time to install nativefier

npm install -g nativefier

to install it globally

now create your webapps.. one important parameter is the –included-urls which allows you to provide a regex matching all url's that the webapp opens.. this is for example often needed when unified login portals or two factor authentication is used and the user is redirected to login on such a page.. any urls opened by the webapp which are not within this scope of addresses will be opened in your system's default browser, just like a normal app would do it.

nativefier --name teams --internal-urls "(login\\.microsoftonline\\.com)|(teams\.microsoft\.com)" "https://teams.microsoft.com"

nativefier --name outlook "https://mail.mycorp.com"