davidmhewitt / elementary-rust-example

A sample of how to build an elementary OS application with Rust

Elementary Rust Example

Rust application template for elementary OS.

❓ What is this?

This repository has all of the necessary boilerplate to build a GTK4 application against the elementary Flatpak Platform using the Granite 7 library.

The example code uses the Granite.Placeholder widget to show a welcome screen, supports the user's dark style preference, remembers the window size and state, uses a custom icon from a GResource file, sets up translations, and has some sample unit tests for the welcome view widget.

You are free to extend upon this template in any way you see fit.

🛠️ Requirements

• meson
• libgranite-7-dev
• libgtk-4-dev
• rust >= 1.64 (Install from rustup as the version available on elementary OS 7.0 is not new enough)

🚀 Getting started

git clone https://github.com/davidmhewitt/elementary-rust-sample
cd elementary-rust-sample
meson setup build
cd build
ninja
ninja install
src/elementary-rust-example

To regenerate translation files (run inside the build directory):

ninja io.github.davidmhewitt.ElementaryRustExample-pot
ninja io.github.davidmhewitt.ElementaryRustExample-update-po
ninja extra-pot
ninja extra-update-po

🤖 GitHub Actions

This repository is set up with a number of actions to help the development process.

• Dependabot is configured to update Rust dependencies in your Cargo files.
• There is an action to test building a Flatpak package against the elementary runtime.
• There is an action to test building the application outside of a Flatpak in an elementary Docker container.
• Finally, there is action to update cargo-sources.json when your Cargo manifests change. This file lists the Cargo crates that flatpak-builder has to download before attempting an offline build in a container.

🐞 Problems/Feature Requests?

Please open an issue if you find any problems or want to get support.

📔 Other Resources

• GUI development with Rust and GTK 4
• Granite Documentation (for Vala, but still useful and relevant)
• granite-rs examples (Granite demo partially re-implemented in Rust)