ExTauri

Warning: Still a Proof of Concept with a lot of bad code! Wrapper around Tauri to enable the development of Phoenix Desktop applications

Acknowledgements

• Tauri App for building it and providing a ton of support to find the right way to build the PoC
• Digit / Doawoo for Burrito which enables us to build the binary to be used as a sidecar
• Kevin Pan / Feng19 for their example that heavily inspired the approach taken with their phx_new_desktop repository
• yos for a great discussion and bringing Feng19 example into the mix (no pun intended)
• Phoenix Framework Tailwind which was a big inspiration on the approach to be taken when it came to install an outside package and use it within an Elixir project

How it works

Tauri.install

• Using Rusts cargo install, installs Tauri in your local dependencies
• Runs tauri init with the given configuration to create your src-tauri folder in your project root
• Overrides Cargo.toml since original Tauri depends on installation folders which made it trickier
• Moves build.rs into src-tauri/src due to an error during development
• Setups the required sidecars in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json

Tauri.run

• Turns off TAURI_SKIP_DEVSERVER_CHECK which was blocking the Tauri code from running main.rs
• Checks if the project has a Burrito release configured
• Wraps the Phoenix application using Burrito
• Renames the output from Burrito to be compatible with Tauri's way of calling a sidecar
• Runs tauri and passes the arguments into Tauri

Installation

Requirements

• Zig (0.10.0)
• Rust

Getting your application ready

For reference please check the example folder in this repository

• Add dependency

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_tauri, git: "https://github.com/filipecabaco/ex_tauri.git"}
  ]
end

• Add configuration

config :ex_tauri, version: "1.4.0", app_name: "Example Desktop", host: "localhost", port: 4000

• Add burrito release

  def project do
    [
      app: :example_desktop,
      version: "0.1.0",
      elixir: "~> 1.14",
      elixirc_paths: elixirc_paths(Mix.env()),
      start_permanent: Mix.env() == :prod,
      aliases: aliases(),
      deps: deps(),
      releases: releases()
    ]
  end
  # ...
  defp releases do
    [
      desktop: [
        steps: [:assemble, &Burrito.wrap/1],
        burrito: [
          targets: [
            # At the moment we still need this really specific names
            "aarch64-apple-darwin": [os: :darwin, cpu: :aarch64]
           ]
        ]
      ]
    ]
  end

• Add :inets and other extra_applications you might need since burrito needs to be aware of them

  def application do
    [
      mod: {ExampleDesktop.Application, []},
      extra_applications: [:logger, :runtime_tools, :inets]
    ]
  end

• Extra: Have a way to start up your repos during startup:

defmodule ExampleDesktop.Starter do
  alias ExampleDesktop.Repo

  def run() do
    Application.ensure_all_started(:ecto_sql)

    Repo.__adapter__().storage_up(Repo.config())
    Ecto.Migrator.run(Repo, :up, all: true)
  end
end

• Check your runtime.exs, there's a lot of environment variables that you might need to build your server

• Setup tauri by running mix ex_tauri.install

Running

• Run tauri in development mode with mix ex_tauri dev

• Build a distributable package with mix ex_tauri build