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re/app

A simple python script that creates a desktop window using Qt, automatically starts your web app's server locally, displays a splashscreen with your application's logo while it's starting and then load the page in a webview once the server is reachable.

Note: Work in progress. It's more of a proof of concept at the moment.

Development

Running

pip3 install PyQt6 PyQt6-WebEngine
python app.py

Configuration

To configure your re/app, edit the config.ini file that is located in the root. It allows you to specify:

  • icon: Path to the image that is to be used as the taskbar's icon and as the splashscreen.
  • title: The window title to display. At the moment, this window title is static, so it cannot be changed at runtime once the application starts.
  • path: The path to your project on which dotnet run will be executed. We may want to update this later to support more than just .NET applications.
  • url: The url of your web application (e.g., https://localhost:12345). Once the server has started, it will load and display the screen. While the local server is starting, the splashscreen will be displayed.

Publishing

To generate an installer for your application, you can use PyInstaller:

pip3 install PyInstaller
pyinstaller app.py

Note that it has to be run on the platform that you are targeting (e.g., on Windows for a Windows installer).

FAQ

Why?

I was developing .NET web applications that I wanted to run in desktop windows. Existing options didn't quite meet my needs:

  • MAUI is not available on Linux, my main operating system.
  • Electron.NET and SpiderEye were a few .NET versions behind, which prevented me from using either.
  • Photino seemed promising, but I encountered issues on Windows (application would not load) and on Linux (WebKit quirks).

All I wanted was a cross-platform way to automatically start the application's server and display the page in a window. How hard could it be? This lead me to create re/app.