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deno_webview

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This project provides deno bindings for webview using the webview rust bindings. Webview is a tiny cross-platform library to render web-based GUIs for desktop applications. This project is still in an early stage of development and stability is sometimes questionable. The plugin should be compatible with MacOS (recently ran into some problems, but cannot solve the problem myself as i do not have acces to a mac), Linux and Windows. It has been tested on Windows and Xubuntu where it worked as expected using the latest versions of deno. The current goal of deno_webview is to provide high quality bindings to webview for creating light cross-platform applications using web technologies.

Example image

Example

Run the following code with the -A and --unstable (and -r if you have used this module before) flags enabled to get the example shown above:

import { WebView } from "../mod.ts";

const html = (n: number) =>
  `
  <html>
  <body>
    <h1>${n}</h1>
  </body>
  </html>
`;

const webview1 = new WebView({
  title: "Multiple deno_webview example",
  url: `data:text/html,${encodeURIComponent(html(1))}`,
  width: 400,
  height: 200,
  resizable: true,
  debug: true,
  frameless: false,
});

const webview2 = new WebView({
  title: "Multiple deno_webview example",
  url: `data:text/html,${encodeURIComponent(html(2))}`,
  width: 400,
  height: 200,
  resizable: true,
  debug: true,
  frameless: false,
});

await Promise.all([webview1.run(), webview2.run()]);

or just run the following in the terminal:

deno run -A -r --unstable https://deno.land/x/webview/examples/multiple.ts

Docs

Docs can be found here.

Mac specific: To use inline html you must first encodeURIComponent (#15).

Development

Prerequisites

For building deno_webview the same prerequisites as for building deno is required (mostly).

Linux

  • webkit2gtk (to install using apt: sudo apt-get install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev)

Cloning

To clone the repo simply run the following:

git clone https://github.com/eliassjogreen/deno_webview.git

and then cd into the repo:

cd deno_webview

Building

Building deno_webview takes about 20-50 minutes the first time (then like a minute) depending on your operating system. When building on Windows admin is required. Building is easiest done by running:

deno run -A scripts/build.ts

or

cargo build --release --locked

optionally with mshtml

deno run -A scripts/build.ts mshtml

or

cargo build --release --locked --no-default-features

Running

To run deno_webview without automatically downloading the binaries from releases you will need to use the enviornment variable DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN and set it to the path where the binaries are located. This is usually file://./target/release. The process of running a using local binaries can be easier to do using the dev script:

deno -A scripts/dev.ts example.ts

Environment variables

  • DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN - The URL of the plugin
    Due to MSHTML (ie) no longer being enabled by default, the only way to enable it is to set the DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN variable to the path of a binary build built with the --no-default-features flag or using deno -A scripts/build.ts mshtml
  • DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN_BASE - The URL of the plugin except the last part. Ignored if DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN is set.
    When developing locally DENO_WEBVIEW_PLUGIN_BASE should be set to the directory containing the plugin binary, usually file://./target/release. Otherwise, don’t set this.
  • DENO_WEBVIEW_DEBUG - Disable cache and enable logs for deno-plugin-prepare. Used for debugging.

Contributing

Contributions either in the form of pull requests or issues are always welcome. Just remember to format using deno -A scripts/fmt.ts (deno fmt and cargo fmt). Thx <3

Dependencies

Deno

Rust