Tauri Runtime Verso

A tauri runtime to replace the backend with Verso

What is Verso

Verso is a browser built on top of the Servo browser engine, and in our case, we use it as a webview. The reason for this is because the Servo embedding APIs are quite low level and requires the user (embedder) to send everything about the system to drive it, and with Verso, we provide Servo with these things under the hood, then expose some higher level APIs so that you can just let it run and only control it when you need something, this is similar to the windowed vs visual hosting mode of WebView2 except for when using Servo directly, you'll need to pass in more than just user inputs

Usage

To get started, you need to add this crate to your project, and use default-feature = false on tauri to disable the wry feature

  [build-dependencies]
  tauri-build = "2"
+ tauri-runtime-verso-build = { git = "https://github.com/versotile-org/tauri-runtime-verso.git" }

  [dependencies]
- tauri = { version = "2", features = [] }
+ tauri = { version = "2", default-features = false, features = ["common-controls-v6", "x11] }
+ tauri-runtime-verso = { git = "https://github.com/versotile-org/tauri-runtime-verso.git" }

In your build script, add the tauri-runtime-verso-build script, which will download the pre-built versoview to versoview/versoview-{target-triple}

Note we currently only have pre-built versoview for x64 Linux, Windows, MacOS and arm64 MacOS, also the download might take a bit of time if you have a slow internet connection

fn main() {
+   tauri_runtime_verso_build::get_verso_as_external_bin().unwrap();
    tauri_build::build();
}

Then add the downloaded executable to your tauri config file (tauri.conf.json) as an external binary file

  {
+   "bundle": {
+     "externalBin": [
+       "versoview/versoview"
+     ]
+   }
  }

Finally, setup the code like this:

fn main() {
-   tauri::Builder::new()
+   tauri_runtime_verso::builder()
        .run(tauri::generate_context!())
        .unwrap();
}

For more, take a look at the hello world example, or a more sophisticated api example show casing how you can use React, tauri plugins, and tray icons with it

Also, you can checkout the documentation

Common Problems

No such file or directory on Linux

This error means either the path you set through set_verso_path is wrong (this should not be a problem if you're using the externalBin setup from the Usage) or the versoview exectuable requires a more recent version of glibc that your system doesn't have, in this case, you'll need to either update your linux distro or build versoview yourself

Tips

Devtools

Since Verso doesn't have a devtools built-in, you'll need to use the one from the Firefox, first put in this in your code

// This will make the webviews created afters this open up a devtools server on this port,
// setting it to 0 for a random port
tauri_runtime_verso::set_verso_devtools_port(1234);

Then go to about:debugging in Firefox and connect to localhost:1234 there

Known limitations

Security

We currently hard coded the Origin header for the custom protocol IPC to work, but this means Tauri won't be able to check for if the URL is a remote URL or a local one for the capabilities, so right now, please don't use this to load arbitrary websites if you have related settings

Menus

Currently, only the app wide menus on macOS are supported, per window menus are not supported yet

For more, checkout the documentation