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