eframe template

This is a template repo for eframe, a framework for writing apps using egui.

The goal is for this to be the simplest way to get started writing a GUI app in Rust.

You can compile your app natively or for the web, and share it using Github Pages.

Getting started

Start by clicking "Use this template" at https://github.com/emilk/eframe_template/ or follow these instructions.

Change the name of the crate: Choose a good name for your project, and change the name to it in:

• Cargo.toml
  • Change the package.name from eframe_template to your_crate.
  • Change the package.authors
• main.rs
  • Change eframe_template::TemplateApp to your_crate::TemplateApp
• index.html
  • Change the <title>eframe template</title> to <title>your_crate</title>. optional.
• assets/sw.js
  • Change the './eframe_template.js' to ./your_crate.js (in filesToCache array)
  • Change the './eframe_template_bg.wasm' to ./your_crate_bg.wasm (in filesToCache array)

Alternatively, you can run fill_template.sh which will ask for the needed names and email and perform the above patches for you. This is particularly useful if you clone this repository outside GitHub and hence cannot make use of its templating function.

Learning about egui

src/app.rs contains a simple example app. This is just to give some inspiration - most of it can be removed if you like.

The official egui docs are at https://docs.rs/egui. If you prefer watching a video introduction, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtUkr_z7l84. For inspiration, check out the the egui web demo and follow the links in it to its source code.

Testing locally

Make sure you are using the latest version of stable rust by running rustup update.

cargo run --release

On Linux you need to first run:

sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev libssl-dev

On Fedora Rawhide you need to run:

dnf install clang clang-devel clang-tools-extra libxkbcommon-devel pkg-config openssl-devel libxcb-devel gtk3-devel atk fontconfig-devel

Web Locally

You can compile your app to WASM and publish it as a web page.

We use Trunk to build for web target.

1. Install the required target with rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown.
2. Install Trunk with cargo install --locked trunk.
3. Run trunk serve to build and serve on http://127.0.0.1:8080. Trunk will rebuild automatically if you edit the project.
4. Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html#dev in a browser. See the warning below.

assets/sw.js script will try to cache our app, and loads the cached version when it cannot connect to server allowing your app to work offline (like PWA). appending #dev to index.html will skip this caching, allowing us to load the latest builds during development.

Web Deploy

1. Just run trunk build --release.
2. It will generate a dist directory as a "static html" website
3. Upload the dist directory to any of the numerous free hosting websites including GitHub Pages.
4. we already provide a workflow that auto-deploys our app to GitHub pages if you enable it.

To enable Github Pages, you need to go to Repository -> Settings -> Pages -> Source -> set to gh-pages branch and / (root).

If gh-pages is not available in Source, just create and push a branch called gh-pages and it should be available.

If you renamed the main branch to something else (say you re-initialized the repository with master as the initial branch), be sure to edit the github workflows .github/workflows/pages.yml file to reflect the change

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - <branch name>

You can test the template app at https://emilk.github.io/eframe_template/.

Updating egui

As of 2023, egui is in active development with frequent releases with breaking changes. eframe_template will be updated in lock-step to always use the latest version of egui.

When updating egui and eframe it is recommended you do so one version at the time, and read about the changes in the egui changelog and eframe changelog.