I’m using Electron for the front-end of my application. In the IcpMain, the main renderer, I create a socket instance. Now I want to use the same socket instance in the other Electron processes.

I tried sharing the socket via a send:

ipcMain.on("get-socket", function (event, arg) {
  event.sender.send("socket", socket);
});

however, the socket is not serializable (using JSON doesn’t help as it is circular).

Then I tried creating a socketManager.js:

const io = require("socket.io-client");

let socketInstance;

function createSocket(server, port) {
  if (!socketInstance) {
    socketInstance = io(`ws://${server}:${port}`, {
      transports: ["websocket"],
    });
  }
  return socketInstance;
}

function getSocket() {
  return socketInstance;
}

module.exports = { createSocket, getSocket,};

However, the socketInstance seems to be undefined after each import, even though I first initialize it in the main process and then call getSocket in the other Electron processes.

Does anyone have any tips?