Reverse engineer Electron apps with REA

Unofficial guide. This site is an independent community guide and is not affiliated with the REA project. For authoritative docs see the official REA website and the morluto/rea GitHub repository. Commands here are taken from the official README/docs (checked 2026-10-13); REA changes quickly, so verify against the official docs.

Electron and JavaScript apps need no disassembler — only Node.js and npm.

Run the analysis

npx -y rea-agents@latest analyze-javascript-application /absolute/path/to/app --json

The target is an extracted app directory or an .asar. rea analyze PATH picks this workflow automatically for directories and .asar files.

Huge output? Save and summarize

Real apps can produce hundreds of MB of Evidence (the docs cite a 334 MB Obsidian file → ~10 KB summary):

rea analyze-javascript-application /absolute/path/to/app --json > app-evidence.json
jq -c '{source: {kind: "inline", evidence: .}, view: {kind: "summary"}}' app-evidence.json > app-view.json
rea inspect-analysis-view app-view.json

Trace a feature

Feature tracing starts from one literal seed: node ID, route, string, API, IPC channel, module or native export, and returns the reachable graph plus any native handoffs. Example from the official showcase: tracing Notion's clipboard bridge from renderer through preload and IPC to the main process.

Related guides

• Use cases
• REA CLI command cheat sheet
• Install REA on Windows

Sources: cli.md · javascript-application-workflows.md

FAQ