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GETTING-STARTED.md

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Getting Started

BrowserWindow needs to be build with one of the following browser frameworks: CEF, WebkitGTK or Edge WebView2. They require either the cef, webkitgtk or edge2 feature to be set.

Picking the right browser framework

Here are the pros and cons of each browser framework. Choose wisely:

CEF

Pros:

  • Is available on all major platforms: Windows, MacOS, Linux (although MacOS support in BrowserWindow needs some work). If you want the exact same behavior of your app on all these platforms, CEF is recommended.
  • Supports the cookie API.
  • Supports the most event types.

Cons:

  • Can be a pain to set up correctly; requires a lot of files to be present for the executable & compilation (especially on Windows) needs some extra care to get it done correctly. Although, there are scripts in this repository to do it for you.
  • No option to link statically & generally not available through package managers.

WebkitGTK

Pros:

  • Generally easily installed on Unix-like systems; a lot of linux distros have a package for it.

Cons:

  • Compiling WebkitGTK or GTK for Windows is not supported.
  • Homebrew package for WebkitGTK seems to be unmaintained.
  • Static linking is also not really supported for GTK.

Edge WebView2

Pro:

  • Preinstalled on Windows 11
  • Can be statically linked to when using the *-pc-windows-msvc toolchain.
  • Can be used to cross-compile for Windows.

Cons:

  • Not cross-platform at all.
  • The framework is not open source, which might be problematic for those concerned about privacy.

Set up Bindgen

BrowserWindow uses Bindgen, which needs some things to be set up on your system. This is explained here pretty well.

Set up WebkitGTK

If you're going to use WebkitGTK, a lot of systems have a convenient package for this. If not, just make sure that pkg-config is set up to find all the headers & binaries.

Debian APT

apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev

Set up Edge WebView2

If you're going to use the Microsoft Edge WebView2 framework, you need to make sure that the runtime is installed on your system.

Some notes on cross-compilation

Cross compilation to the *-pc-windows-gnu target works. Just make sure that MinGW is set up to find the headers of the win32 API.

Moreover, you need to ship the executable together with the WebView2Loader.dll file. It can be obtained on non-Windows systems, by installing nuget, and downloading it with:

nuget install Microsoft.Web.WebView2

It will be installed in the current working directory, and then the .dll file can be located at Microsoft.Web.WebView2.*/build/native/<arch>.

Set up CEF

Keep in mind when you're going to use CEF, that BrowserWindow is written to work for a specific version of CEF, and CEF does release new major versions fairly often. Therefore, it is recommended to obtain the version that BrowserWindow supports, which currently is v122. Use other versions at your own risk.

CEF isn't generally available in package managers, so it needs to be set up manually. Luckily, there are binaries avaiable. You can also build it from source, but that is a whole other beast and it is not covered by this guide.

If you want to set up CEF by building it from source, take a look at this. However, it will take a lot of effort, time, memory & disk space for the compilation process.

Otherwise, if you're on linux, here it the TL;DR version on setting up CEF:

Linux

git clone https://github.com/bamidev/browser-window
cd browser-window
./get-cef.sh                                   # Download & compile CEF
export CEF_PATH= ...                           # Set environment variable
./setup-cef-files.sh                           # Put necessary files in target/debug
cargo run --example terminal --features cef    # Run example code to test if it works

Windows

git clone https://github.com/bamidev/browser-window
cd browser-window    # Download & compile CEF
.\get-cef.ps1        # Set environment variable

Then, add the printed environment variable to your system environment variables for next time.

.\setup-cef-files.bat                          # Put necessary files in target/debug
cargo run --example terminal --features cef    # Run example code to test if it works

As long as CEF_PATH is set correctly on the system you're compiling on, compilation of browser-window should work even if it is a dependency of your crate. But you still need to copy files (just like setup-cef-files.sh does) to your crate's target/debug directory.

Download & Extract

If you're going to set it up manually, you need to get the binaries first. You can get the latest prebuilt binaries here. The 'minimal' package will be fine. Once downloaded, you will need to extract it somewhere.

Compilation

The library itself is already compiled for the binary distribution. However, there is a static 'wrapper' library that still needs to be built. To do this, first run cmake by running this on the command line from within the extracted folder:

cmake .

Keep in mind that currently, right out of the box, CEF seems to miss a symbol when compiled. This can be solved by defining DCHECK_ALWAYS_ON before compiling, which can be straightforward in Visual Studio. Otherwise, you can also just add add_compile_definitions(DCHECK_ALWAYS_ON=1) to the beginning of the CMakeLists.txt file. Another solution might be to build the cmake project in debug mode: cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .

Unix-like Systems

After you have run cmake, you can just simply run make. This will build the wrapper lib for CEF.

Windows

A newly generated Visual Studio solution has been generated in the folder. You should build this solution's Release target with Visual Studio. However, before you do, you need to change one setting in the project's settings.

Make sure to compile the project as a static lib (.lib).

Now you can just build the solution.

Environment Variables & Resource Files

Once you have extracted and compiled everything, we need to let Browser Window know where it can find the header and library files to link to. If you set environment variable CEF_PATH to the directory that you have extracted, Browser Window is able to find them. Otherwise, cargo will fail to build browser-window.

You also need to copy resource and library files (.so/.dll and .bin), so that they are available to the executable. Running setup-cef-files.sh or setup-cef-files.bat copies them to the target folder so that you can just run your compiled binaries normally. It will also change some permissions that CEF requires you to do. setup-cef-files.sh will use sudo, so if you don't have sudo, inspect the file and execute the commands yourself.

For the library files, you could also just add the Release folder to your PATH environment variable for the .so/.dll files.

That's it! Running cargo run should just work now.

If you encounter any issues, take a look at the issue diagnosis page. If that doesn't help, you can submit an issue to the repository.