Publishing

After you have build your application, you will need to publish it somewhere. This reference will outline different methods of publishing your desktop or web application.

Web: Publishing with GitHub Pages

Edit your Dioxus.toml to point your out_dir to the docs folder and the base_path to the name of your repo:

[application]
# ...
out_dir = "docs"

[web.app]
base_path = "your_repo"

Then build your app and publish it to Github:

• Make sure GitHub Pages is set up for your repo to publish any static files in the docs directory
• Build your app with:

dx build --release

• Make a copy of your docs/index.html file and rename the copy to docs/404.html so that your app will work with client-side routing
• Add and commit with git
• Push to GitHub

Desktop: Creating an installer

Dioxus desktop app uses your operating system's WebView library, so it's portable to be distributed for other platforms.

In this section, we'll cover how to bundle your app for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Preparing your application for bundling

Depending on your platform, you may need to add some additional code to your main.rs file to make sure your app is ready for bundling. On Windows, you'll need to add the #![windows_subsystem = "windows"] attribute to your main.rs file to hide the terminal window that pops up when you run your app. If you're developing on Windows, only use this when bundling. It will disable the terminal, so you will not get logs of any kind. You can gate it behind a feature, like so:

# Cargo.toml
[features]
bundle = []

And then your main.rs:

#![cfg_attr(feature = "bundle", windows_subsystem = "windows")]

Adding assets to your application

If you want to bundle assets with your application, you can either use them with the manganis crate (covered more in the assets page), or you can include them in your Dioxus.toml file:

[bundle]
# The list of files to include in the bundle. These can contain globs.
resources = ["main.css", "header.svg", "**/*.png"]

Install dioxus CLI

The first thing we'll do is install the dioxus-cli. This extension to cargo will make it very easy to package our app for the various platforms.

To install, simply run

cargo install dioxus-cli

Building

To bundle your application you can simply run dx bundle --release (also add --features bundle if you're using that, see the this for more) to produce a final app with all the optimizations and assets builtin.

Once you've ran the command, your app should be accessible in dist/bundle/.

For example, a macOS app would look like this:

Nice! And it's only 4.8 Mb – extremely lean!! Because Dioxus leverages your platform's native WebView, Dioxus apps are extremely memory efficient and won't waste your battery.

Note: not all CSS works the same on all platforms. Make sure to view your app's CSS on each platform – or web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) before publishing.