tauri-apps/tauri

Tauri is a framework for packaging an HTML/JS/CSS frontend into desktop and mobile applications, with a Rust binary as the backend. Its distinguishing choice is rendering through the operating system's own webview rather than bundling a browser engine, which is the basis for its claim of small, fast binaries. It is aimed at developers who already work with web frontends and want a packaged app with a native layer they can extend.

What changes in your workflow

You keep your existing frontend stack, since Tauri accepts any framework that compiles to HTML, JS and CSS, and you add a Rust backend that the frontend calls through an API. Window handling comes from tao, and rendering from WRY, which maps to WKWebView on macOS and iOS, WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux and Android System WebView on Android. Because the app uses the system webview, Tauri does not run a local HTTP server to serve the frontend contents.

Around the app itself, the project provides a bundler for formats such as .app, .dmg, .deb, .rpm, .AppImage, NSIS .exe and WiX .msi, plus a desktop-only self-updater, system tray icons, native notifications, a GitHub Action and a VS Code extension.

Getting started and platform support

The documented start is to install the prerequisites for your system and scaffold a project with create-tauri-app (for example via npm create tauri-app@latest); the prerequisite page is the authoritative setup reference. Supported targets are Windows 10+, macOS 10.15+, iOS/iPadOS 9+, Android 7+ (currently 8+), and Linux via webkit2gtk 4.0 for Tauri v1 (e.g. Ubuntu 18.04) or webkit2gtk 4.1 for v2 (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04). The split by Tauri version matters: a Linux machine that works for one major version may not satisfy the other.

Limits to keep in mind

Using the platform webview means rendering behaviour and available features follow the engine on each OS, not a single bundled engine; this was raised in early discussion of Tauri's "native" label, with a reply noting it at least uses each platform's efficient engine compared with Electron. The README's feature list is explicitly non-exhaustive and does not report binary sizes, performance measurements or security audit results. The self-updater is desktop-only, so mobile update flow is outside that feature.

Licensing is MIT or MIT/Apache-2.0 where applicable, with the logo under CC-BY-NC-ND, so the logo terms are separate from the code terms.

Project source and documentation