Using Pepper Flash Plugin

Electron supports the Pepper Flash plugin. To use the Pepper Flash plugin in Electron, you should manually specify the location of the Pepper Flash plugin and then enable it in your application.

Prepare a Copy of Flash Plugin

On macOS and Linux, the details of the Pepper Flash plugin can be found by navigating to chrome://plugins in the Chrome browser. Its location and version are useful for Electron’s Pepper Flash support. You can also copy it to another location.

Add Electron Switch

You can directly add --ppapi-flash-path and --ppapi-flash-version to the Electron command line or by using the app.commandLine.appendSwitch method before the app ready event. Also, turn on plugins option of BrowserWindow.

For example:

const {app, BrowserWindow} = require('electron')
const path = require('path')

// Specify flash path, supposing it is placed in the same directory with main.js.
let pluginName
switch (process.platform) {
  case 'win32':
    pluginName = 'pepflashplayer.dll'
    break
  case 'darwin':
    pluginName = 'PepperFlashPlayer.plugin'
    break
  case 'linux':
    pluginName = 'libpepflashplayer.so'
    break
}
app.commandLine.appendSwitch('ppapi-flash-path', path.join(__dirname, pluginName))

// Optional: Specify flash version, for example, v17.0.0.169
app.commandLine.appendSwitch('ppapi-flash-version', '17.0.0.169')

app.on('ready', () => {
  let win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    webPreferences: {
      plugins: true
    }
  })
  win.loadURL(`file://${__dirname}/index.html`)
  // Something else
})

You can also try loading the system wide Pepper Flash plugin instead of shipping the plugins yourself, its path can be received by calling app.getPath('pepperFlashSystemPlugin').

Enable Flash Plugin in a <webview> Tag

Add plugins attribute to <webview> tag.

<webview src="http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/" plugins></webview>

Troubleshooting

You can check if Pepper Flash plugin was loaded by inspecting navigator.plugins in the console of devtools (although you can’t know if the plugin’s path is correct).

The architecture of Pepper Flash plugin has to match Electron’s one. On Windows, a common error is to use 32bit version of Flash plugin against 64bit version of Electron.

On Windows the path passed to --ppapi-flash-path has to use \ as path delimiter, using POSIX-style paths will not work.

For some operations, such as streaming media using RTMP, it is necessary to grant wider permissions to players’ .swf files. One way of accomplishing this, is to use nw-flash-trust.