NOTE: This is experimental, not a product

Setup Development Environment

This is a polyglot project, speaking Rust and Javascript, which means there are multiple language build systems and dependency management tools.

The large dependencies for development are:

• Rust (rustlang) toolchain (let's say v1.50+ stable)
• Node.js (including npm)

One set of paths to install the first two are rustup (for Rust) and nvm (for Node.js ecosystem, including npm).

Tauri CLI Tool

It isn't strictly necessary to have the Tauri CLI tool installed, but it was used to set the project up and may be handy.

There is a Rust version, and a Javascript version that wraps the Rust version. If you install the Javascript version, it just downloads a compiled copy of the Rust binary. But then it ends up in node_modules/, and pulls in a ton of other things.

You can also install it locally to your user, via the Rust toolchain, but this can take a fairly long time to compile (10+ minutes):

# NOTE: this command, from the docs, does not work
# cargo install tauri-cli --version 1.0.0-beta.7

# This should work
cargo install tauri-cli --git https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

UPDATE: one way forward is to install tauri-cli as a global package; that way it does not add many dependencies to the local project:

npm install -g @tauri-apps/cli

Development Basics

Check that tools are installed, and fetch node/npm depdendencies:

make deps

Run these commands in separate terminal windows to do file edit watching and auto-reloading/recompile of both the Rust application and Javascript bundle:

make dev-js

# this requires the Tauri Rust CLI
make dev-tauri

From within the app window, in dev/debug mode, if you right click you get options for "reload" and "Inspect Element"; the later will open browser-style developer tools inside the application. Every time you reload, the bundle gets recompiled and the web part of the application is restarted.

Run Rust tests (if any):

make test

Do a development build of the application:

make build

Do a release binary build of the application (with size optimizations):

make build-release

Make installable bundles for the current platform:

make bundle