Desktop Overview

Build a standalone native desktop app that looks and feels the same across operating systems.

Apps built with Dioxus are typically <5mb in size and use existing system resources, so they won't hog extreme amounts of RAM or memory.

Examples:

• File Explorer
• WiFi Scanner

Support

The desktop is a powerful target for Dioxus but is currently limited in capability when compared to the Web platform. Currently, desktop apps are rendered with the platform's WebView library, but your Rust code is running natively on a native thread. This means that browser APIs are not available, so rendering WebGL, Canvas, etc is not as easy as the Web. However, native system APIs are accessible, so streaming, WebSockets, filesystem, etc are all viable APIs. In the future, we plan to move to a custom web renderer-based DOM renderer with WGPU integrations.

Dioxus Desktop is built off Tauri. Right now there aren't any Dioxus abstractions over keyboard shortcuts, menubar, handling, etc, so you'll want to leverage Tauri – mostly Wry and Tao) directly.

Getting started

Platform-Specific Dependencies

Dioxus desktop renders through a web view. Depending on your platform, you might need to install some dependancies.

Windows

Windows Desktop apps depend on WebView2 – a library that should be installed in all modern Windows distributions. If you have Edge installed, then Dioxus will work fine. If you don't have Webview2, then you can install it through Microsoft. MS provides 3 options:

1. A tiny "evergreen" bootstrapper that fetches an installer from Microsoft's CDN
2. A tiny installer that fetches Webview2 from Microsoft's CDN
3. A statically linked version of Webview2 in your final binary for offline users

For development purposes, use Option 1.

Linux

Webview Linux apps require WebkitGtk. When distributing, this can be part of your dependency tree in your .rpm or .deb. However, likely, your users will already have WebkitGtk.

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev

When using Debian/bullseye libappindicator3-dev is no longer available but replaced by libayatana-appindicator3-dev.

# on Debian/bullseye use:
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev

If you run into issues, make sure you have all the basics installed, as outlined in the Tauri docs.

MacOS

Currently – everything for macOS is built right in! However, you might run into an issue if you're using nightly Rust due to some permissions issues in our Tao dependency (which have been resolved but not published).

Creating a Project

Create a new crate:

cargo new --bin demo
cd demo

Add Dioxus and the desktop renderer as dependencies (this will edit your Cargo.toml):

cargo add dioxus
cargo add dioxus-desktop

Edit your main.rs:

#![allow(non_snake_case)]
// import the prelude to get access to the `rsx!` macro and the `Scope` and `Element` types
use dioxus::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    // launch the dioxus app in a webview
    dioxus_desktop::launch(App);
}

// define a component that renders a div with the text "Hello, world!"
fn App(cx: Scope) -> Element {
    cx.render(rsx! {
        div {
            "Hello, world!"
        }
    })
}