webview-example

README

webview-example

This repo contains an example/starter for building a webview app in Go.

Webview is a cross-platform library for creating desktop web applications (similar to Electron).

This repo compiles to a 6.7MB executable on Pop!OS 22.04.

Quickstart

Prerequisites

Check the webview docs for what dependencies you'll need.

How it Works

This example uses a HTTP server for serving the content. The server listens on a random available port so there is no concern for conflicts.

Static files and HTML can be found in server/. These files are embedded into the app using the embed package.

It's not included in this example, but you could implement a REST API or use websockets to handle the communication between the UI and the server. The webview library also provides Eval() and Bind() functions for calling JS and Go code respectively. I have not done any benchmarking, but I imagine that any difference between these choices is negligible.

Running the App

go run .

The window first appears as a blank white page while the browser engine is initializing. There isn't a way to avoid this with the current webview version, however there is an open feature request to support this.

Developer Tools

Developer tools can be enabled/disabled by passing a bool to webview.New(). You can access the devtools via right click > Inspect Element.

You can disable the devtools when building (or running) the app by passing -ldflags "-X main.debug=false". For example:

# Build to ./app and disable devtools
go build -ldflags "-X main.debug=false" -o app .

There doesn't seem to be any performance hit to leaving devtools on, but probably worth disabling if you don't want users snooping around your app.