capacitor_bindings

Capacitor bindings to help you build android and ios apps using rust.

These can be used from framework that builds with trunk e.g. yew, sycamore, seed, etc.

This crate is still in the early stages. Use at your own risk. When capacitor make breaking changes, this crate will make breaking changes to stay up to date.

I have successfully used this to build both iOS and Android apps.

In the Setup section below I explain how you can have a single version of your code and which can be built for both web and mobile platforms.

This crate provides bindings for some of the official capacitor plugins. I intend to support them all eventually. Please submit an issue or pull request if there is a particular one you need as they are fairly easy to add support for.

Current support is as follows

Some unofficial plugins are also supported behind feature flags

Some of the functions are only available on certain platforms. Use the features web, android, or ios to get access to them if you are building for that platform.

Run the example project to see all of the available features in action.

How to use

use capacitor_bindings::toast::*;

async fn greet() {
    Toast::show("Hello World").await;
}

Setup

Prerequisites

You must do the Capacitor environment setup installing node, xcode and android studio as needed.

You must also have trunk installed

cargo install trunk

You must have a rust web app that builds with trunk. You can try it out using the example application in this repository.

Adding Capacitor to your app

Install Capacitor

Navigate to the directory containing your index.html file

Install Capacitor

npm i @capacitor/core
npm i -D @capacitor/cli

Initialize your app with the questionnaire. You will have to answer some questions and decide the name of your app. Make sure the "web asset directory" is the same as your trunk output folder (usually dist)

npx cap init

You should probably add the following to your .gitignore as some npm files do not need to be committed

## Node
node_modules
package-lock.json
package.json

Add android and ios as needed

npm i @capacitor/android
npx cap add android

npm i @capacitor/ios
npx cap add ios

Add the plugins that you want e.g.

npm install @capacitor/toast

Add this crate to your project

cargo add capacitor_bindings --features web,android,ios

Add calls to the plugins where you need them. If you have a yew project, you could add the following to one of your function_component

    use_effect(||yew::platform::spawn_local(capacitor_bindings::toast::Toast::show("Hello World")));

Some plugins have additional installation steps (such as adding to the android manifest xml) that you will need to follow. the list of official plugins is here

You should now be able to run your app on android or ios

trunk build --release
npx cap sync
npx cap run android

You can also do npx cap open android to open the project in android studio.

Enabling Capacitor on the web

You must likely want to be able run a web version of your app as well as the mobile version, if only for debugging.

The setup for this is slightly involved

First you need to generate a capacitor.js file. The easiest way to do this is to set bundledWebRuntime in your capacitor.config.json file to true. Then you can run npx cap sync and it will create capacitor.js in your dist folder. Move that into your root folder and set bundledWebRuntime back to false. Alternatively, just copy the file from the example application in this repository.

You then need to convert all the plugins you are using from npm modules into ordinary js files. The is a tool called pika that will do this for you.

npm install pika

npx @pika/web --dest plugins

Now you need to change your index.html to include all these files and also the capacitor pwa elements

Add the following to your head section

<script src="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/raw/main/capacitor.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script
    type="module"
    src="https://unpkg.com/@ionic/pwa-elements@latest/dist/ionicpwaelements/ionicpwaelements.esm.js"
></script>
<script
    nomodule
    src="https://unpkg.com/@ionic/pwa-elements@latest/dist/ionicpwaelements/ionicpwaelements.js"
></script>

<script src="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/raw/main/plugins/@capacitor/toast.js" type="module"></script>

<link data-trunk rel="copy-file" href="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/blob/main/capacitor.js" />

<link data-trunk rel="copy-dir" href="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/blob/main/plugins" />

Replace the <script src="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/raw/main/plugins/@capacitor/toast.js" type="module"></script> line with one line for each plugin you are using

If you now do trunk serve it should run in the browser and you will have access to the web versions of the plugins. This will also not break the android build but you will get error messages about those .js files not being available when you run on android.

To prevent this, and also to allow you to pass different features to each version, you should make a copy of your index.html and name it android.html. From this file you can remove all of the lines you just added to your head section.

Then to run on android, do

trunk build --release android.html
npx cap sync
npx cap run android

Features

Some of the plugin functions only work on certain platforms. For example setting the status bar style doesn't work on the web.

To enable these features for the appropriate builds, add the following to your cargo.toml

[features]
web =["capacitor_bindings/web"]
android = ["capacitor_bindings/android"]
ios = ["capacitor_bindings/ios"]

To only use a feature when it is available you need to have a section of your rust code that is only build when that feature is enabled.

#[cfg(feature="android")]
{
    StatusBar::set_style(Style::Light).await;
    StatusBar::set_background_color("#FFFFFF").await;
}

You can control which features trunk will build by using the data-cargo-features attribute in the link tag in your index.html or android.html

<body>
    <link rel="rust" data-trunk href="https://github.com/wainwrightmark/capacitor_bindings/blob/main/Cargo.toml" data-bin="myapp" data-cargo-features="android" />
</body>

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Open a pull request to fix a bug, or open an issue to discuss a new feature or change.

Check out the Contributing section in the docs for more info.

License

This project is proudly licensed under the MIT license (LICENSE or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).

capacitor_bindings can be distributed according to the MIT license. Contributions will be accepted under the same license.

Authors

• Mark Wainwright