Electron Forge stuck on same 3 steps

[bayturtleking]

Pre-flight checklist

• I have read the contribution documentation for this project.
• I agree to follow the code of conduct that this project uses.
• I have searched the issue tracker for a bug that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Forge version

7.11.2

Electron version

43.4.1

Operating system

CachyOS (Arch-based), kernel 7.2.0-1-cachyos

Last known working Forge version

N/A

Expected behavior

electron-forge make SHOULD package the app and make distributable installers (deb/rpm), like how it did on Windows without changing a thing.

Actual behavior

Packaging just hangs with no message, mostly inside the "Copying files" / "Preparing native dependencies" / "Finalizing package" steps.

Steps to reproduce

I didn't see this at first, and I put it in Additional Information, sorry :(

Additional information

It's my first time trying a Linux build on this machine, the same repo and forge.config.js builds fine on Windows and gives me a working installer so I really don't think the config is the problem here.

Basically electron-forge make gets half way through packaging and then just stops. There's no error and no crash, it just sits there. Somewhere in these steps:

❯ Packaging for x64 on linux
  ❯ Copying files
  ❯ Preparing native dependencies
  ❯ Finalizing package

And it's not really consistent which one it dies on.

Most of the time it just hangs forever. I left it running once and after 14 minutes it had burned through like 9 seconds of actual CPU time, so whatever it's "doing" isn't much of anything.

Solutions I've already ruled out: pretty sure it's not disk, same thing happens on an exFAT external drive and on my btrfs root partition. Not memory either, free -h showed 9+GB free the whole time it was stuck. Not network, ss -tnp showed zero connections from the node process. Checked /proc/<pid>/status and it's sitting in S (sleeping) not D, so it's not blocked on disk IO at the kernel level.

I ran strace -p <pid> -f during one of the hangs and the main thread was just looping on epoll_pwait/write, basically redrawing the spinner over and over?? Worker threads were all idle in futex waits. So as far as I can tell literally nothing is happening even though Forge still says the step is "running."

When it does make progress, /proc/<pid>/fd shows it writing Electron locale .pak files one at a time. But it'll just randomly stop partway through, I watched it sit on ru.pak for like 6 minutes until I manually stopped it.

I cleared ~/.cache/electron for a fresh download, I cleared /tmp/electron-packager before every retry, same thing every time. I pulled @electron-forge/plugin-auto-unpack-natives out since I don't even have native dependencies, no change, I put it back. I tried just the deb target by itself with npx electron-forge make --targets=@electron-forge/maker-deb to rule out AppImage/RPM causing it, but it still hung. Same with maker-rpm. Updated all the @electron-forge/* packages to newest, but no difference. I checked dmesg and journalctl for OOM kills or crashes, but there was nothing.

I have not tried downgrading off Node 26 yet, that's my next move since it's pretty new and this could just be something nobody's reported yet or I haven't seen.

Repro from a clean install:

npm install
npx electron-forge make --targets=@electron-forge/maker-deb

forge.config.js:

const { FusesPlugin } = require('@electron-forge/plugin-fuses');
const { FuseV1Options, FuseVersion } = require('@electron/fuses');
const { MakerAppImage } = require('@reforged/maker-appimage');

module.exports = {
  packagerConfig: {
    asar: true,
    electronLanguages: ['en-US', 'en'],
  },
  rebuildConfig: {},
  makers: [
    { name: '@electron-forge/maker-wix', platforms: ['win32'], config: { language: 1033, manufacturer: 'ShellSurfer' } },
    { name: '@electron-forge/maker-zip', platforms: ['darwin'] },
    { name: '@electron-forge/maker-deb', config: {} },
    { name: '@electron-forge/maker-rpm', config: {} },
    new MakerAppImage({ options: {} }),
  ],
  plugins: [
    { name: '@electron-forge/plugin-auto-unpack-natives', config: {} },
    new FusesPlugin({
      version: FuseVersion.V1,
      [FuseV1Options.RunAsNode]: false,
      [FuseV1Options.EnableCookieEncryption]: true,
      [FuseV1Options.EnableNodeOptionsEnvironmentVariable]: false,
      [FuseV1Options.EnableNodeCliInspectArguments]: false,
      [FuseV1Options.EnableEmbeddedAsarIntegrityValidation]: true,
      [FuseV1Options.OnlyLoadAppFromAsar]: true,
    }),
  ],
};

package.json dependencies:

"dependencies": {
  "chroma-js": "^3.2.0",
  "electron-prompt": "^1.7.0",
  "electron-squirrel-startup": "^1.0.1"
}

Google hasn't been a massive help either.

[duncte123]

First things first, please update your issue title to be more descriptive.

I had the same issue as well, and after a lot of debugging I found out that switching to node 22 with npm 10.9.8 resolved this exact issue (stuff builds again). On node v24.16.0 (npm 11.13.0) I get the hanging behaviour.

edit: also seems that this is a duplicate of #4277