A Lightweight Electron 'compatible' App Container
Thomas Tschurtschenthaler

Electrico is an experimental alternative App Container for Electron Apps.

It is written in Rust and Javascript on top of the cross-platform WebView rendering library Wry/Tauri.

All Javascript code is executed within embedded system-native Web Views - one for the NodeJS 'backend', one for each Electron App-GUI browser window. The Electron and Node APIs are emulated with corresponding Rust API calls. All communcation between the Web Views and Rust runs on synchronous and asynchronous XMLHttpRequests.

Electrico comes lightweight - no need to bundle Node.js and Chromium binaries with the App executable!

• build size down to about 10MB
• cross platform for linux, macos, windows, ios and android
• debugging frontend and backend with native browser dev-tools

As for now some basic Electron and Node APIs are - partly - implemented:

• common Electron App startup and BrowserWindow methods
• Electron IPC and preload.js
• parts of the Electron dialog API (OpenDialog, SaveDialog, MessageBox)
• basic parts of NodeJS file system API (access, fstat, mkdir, readfile, writefile, watch)
• parts of NodeJS process API (child_process spawn)

The Test App is configured to start up by default when Electrico is started from the project folder

cargo run

When Electrico is started in debug mode, it opens a browser dev tools window for the 'node backend' where debugging takes place. Also all GUI windows are shown with dev tools.

To start Electrico without dev tools, run

cargo run --release

As a more ambitious showcase I chose Codex by Josh Vickery.

Clone Codex Github and give it a try.

From the Codex repository folder start Codex in DEV mode:

pnpm dev

Codex starts up with Electron - you may close the Electron Window as we only need the DEV-Server running on port 5173. Then point the link in ResourceLink.json to the Codex repository folder and start up Electrico:

cargo run