An attempt to make Tauri run from a Docker container.

This image is not meant to handle the frontend and its devtools: only the core (Rust) part.
If you need a full app to work with Docker, you'll need to use Compose to have the core and the frontend as separate images.

This image provides a ready-to-use Tauri CLI (built from Cargo) for Debian-based systems.

Assuming you already have Git and Docker installed.

Clone the repo, get in there, then build the image:

docker build -t tauri .

Because of GTK (a GUI software), we need to add some more flags to run Tauri properly, which make it quite verbose:

docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/app -w /app -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e "DISPLAY=${DISPLAY:-:0.0}" --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -it tauri cargo tauri --help

-v `pwd`:/app -w /app flags are used to link your current working directory to the container /app dir.
Whatever happens there, happens to your current dir.

-v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix is required to make your container communicate with your host X11 server.

-e "DISPLAY=${DISPLAY:-:0.0}" another flag to run a GUI from Docker, we need to set it explicitly.

--user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" allows us to run the container with our current host user, to avoid files permissions issues.

To avoid mistakes, you'd better create an alias like this for your profile:

alias tauri='docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/app -w /app -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e "DISPLAY=${DISPLAY:-:0.0}" --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -it tauri cargo tauri '

Then, simply run your commands (see here for more details)!

In this repo, start with tauri init and answer the questions with "Test", "Test", "../frontend" and "../frontend".

Next run tauri dev, wait for everything to download then the GUI should open on https://tauri.studio.

I may have forgotten some steps to make it work, here are a few leads:

• run xhost local:root to make sure your host can open a GUI from your container.
• I've removed --net=host flag when running the container because it didn't look mandatory.

When running the dev command, killing the container will stop the GUI but not the whole process (but closing the GUI does).

• Make sure nothing weird happens/breaks
• Try to build
• Have a better way to handle permissions
• Provide a docker-compose.yml sample
• Support more systems