desktop/registry-js

registry-js

A simple and opinionated library for working with the Windows registry

Goals

• zero dependencies
• faster than reg.exe
• implement based on usage - don't replicate the registry API
• leverage TypeScript declarations wherever possible

Note: This is currently in preview, with support for features that GitHub Desktop and Atom require.

Install

$ npm install --save registry-js
# or
$ yarn add registry-js

But Why?

The current set of libraries for interacting with the registry have some limitations that meant we couldn't use it in GitHub Desktop:

• windows-registry depends on ffi at runtime, which caused issues with webpack-ing, and was missing APIs we needed.
• winreg depends on reg.exe which breaks as soon as you enable "Prevent access to registry editing tools" Group Policy rules (yes, even QUERY operations are caught by this). More details about this can be found in desktop/desktop#3105.

After exploring other options like invoking PowerShell - which was too slow - we decided to write our own little library to do the stuff we require by invoking the Win32 APIs directly.

Documentation

See the documentation under the docs folder.

Supported versions

Each release of registry-js includes prebuilt binaries for the versions of Node and Electron that are actively supported by these projects. Please refer to the release documentation for Node and Electron to see what is supported currently.

Contributing

Read the Setup section to ensure your development environment is setup for what you need.

This project isn't about implementing a 1-1 replication of the Windows registry API, but implementing just enough for whatever usages there are in the wild.

If you want to see something supported, open an issue to start a discussion about it.