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Getting Started
This section will help you set up your Dioxus project!
Prerequisites
An Editor
Dioxus integrates very well with the Rust-Analyzer LSP plugin which will provide appropriate syntax highlighting, code navigation, folding, and more.
Rust
Head over to https://rust-lang.org and install the Rust compiler.
We strongly recommend going through the official Rust book completely. However, our hope is that a Dioxus app can serve as a great first Rust project. With Dioxus, you'll learn about:
- Error handling
- Structs, Functions, Enums
- Closures
- Macros
We've put a lot of care into making Dioxus syntax familiar and easy to understand, so you won't need deep knowledge on async, lifetimes, or smart pointers until you really start building complex Dioxus apps.
Platform-Specific Dependencies
Windows
Windows Desktop apps depend on WebView2 – a library which should be installed in all modern Windows distributions. If you have Edge installed, then Dioxus will work fine. If you don't have Webview2, then you can install it through Microsoft. MS provides 3 options:
- A tiny "evergreen" bootstrapper which will fetch an installer from Microsoft's CDN
- A tiny installer which will fetch Webview2 from Microsoft's CDN
- A statically linked version of Webview2 in your final binary for offline users
For development purposes, use Option 1.
Linux
Webview Linux apps require WebkitGtk. When distributing, this can be part of your dependency tree in your .rpm or .deb. However, it's very likely that your users will already have WebkitGtk.
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev
When using Debian/bullseye libappindicator3-dev is no longer available but replaced by libayatana-appindicator3-dev.
# on Debian/bullseye use:
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev
If you run into issues, make sure you have all the basics installed, as outlined in the Tauri docs.
MacOS
Currently – everything for macOS is built right in! However, you might run into an issue if you're using nightly Rust due to some permissions issues in our Tao dependency (which have been resolved but not published).
Suggested Cargo Extensions
If you want to keep your traditional npm install XXX workflow for adding packages, you might want to install cargo-edit and a few other fun cargo extensions:
- cargo-expand for expanding macro calls
- cargo tree – an integrated cargo command that lets you inspect your dependency tree
Setup Guides
Dioxus supports multiple platforms. Depending on what you want, the setup is a bit different.
- Web: running in the browser using WASM
- Server Side Rendering: render Dioxus HTML as text
- Desktop: a standalone app using webview
- Mobile
- Terminal UI: terminal text-based graphic interface