dioxus-desktop-template

A starter template for Dioxus Desktop apps, with Tailwind & Nix support.

Goal

Act as starter project for writing new desktop apps using Dioxus, along with

• Nix support
• Author's preferred tools
  • Tailwind

Tasks

This repository is still a work-in-progress. Here's the current progress:

• Nix
  • Devshell
  • Nix package
    • Simple nix build / nix run
    • Nix package containing macOS app bundle
    • Nix package for Linux
• Deployment
  • macOS bundling
  • Linux bundling
• Tailwind
• Routes & navigation
• Application state (via dioxus-signals from 0.5)

Stretch goals:

• macOS Application menu entries

Getting Starred

In the nix develop shell, run:

just watch 

Creating macOS app bundle

just bundle

Running via Nix

nix run github:srid/dioxus-desktop-template
# Or just `nix run` in the project directory

Notes

Application State

This repository began in large part to understand how to manage application state in Dioxus Desktop apps, and come up with some best demonstrable practices for it.

• Shared read-only state
  • In the top App component, use use_shared_state_provider to initialize the application state.
  • In inner components, use use_shared_state::<T>, followed by a .read() on it, to access the current state value.
  • The state can be changed to a new value, but not mutated. There is no per-field granularity.
• Shared state, that can be modified (from anywhere in the component tree)
  • We use dioxus-signals (requires Dioxus from Git) to provide fine-grained mutation and component rerendering.
  • In the top App component, use use_context_provider(cx, AppState::new());
  • In inner components, use let state: AppState = *use_context(cx).unwrap(); to access the current state value.
  • Make individual fields of the state struct a Signal type
    • The state struct should use Signal for its field types. Nested tree of Signals is the idiom.
  • Use state.<field> to render a component based on a field signal
    • Use dioxus_signals::use_selector to produce a derived signal
• Component re-renders when only relevant subset of the state changes
• State modification that relies on a long-running blocking task
  • Write async modifier methods on the state struct, and have them update the field signals.
  • In the UI components, use use_future to invoke these async methods to update the state before the component is renderer (or upon an user event).

Uses rust-flake

This project uses rust-flake to keep flake.nix minimal.

FAQ

• Blank screen on Linux? See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/32580

  WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 nix run