pywebview

pywebview is a lightweight cross-platform wrapper around a webview component that allows to display HTML content in its own native GUI window. It gives you power of web technologies in your desktop application, eliminating the need of launching a web browser. Combined with a lightweight web framework like Flask, Bottle or web.py, you can create beautiful cross-platform HTML5 user interfaces targeting WebKit, while hiding implementation details from the end user. If HTML is not your strong point, you might want to use REMI, which allows you to create HTML based interfaces using Python code only.

pywebview is lightweight and has no dependencies on an external GUI framework. It uses native GUI for creating a web component window: Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on Mac OSX and Qt4/5 or GTK3 on Linux. If you choose to freeze your application, it does not bundle a heavy GUI toolkit with it keeping the executable size small. Compatible with both Python 2 and 3. While Android is not supported, you can use the same codebase with solutions like Python for Android for creating an APK.

License

The BSD license

Gallery

Apps created with pywebview. If you have built an app using pywebview, please do not hesitate to showcase it.

Next for Traktor: http://flowrl.com/next
Traktor Librarian: http://flowrl.com/librarian/

Installation

If you have the dependencies installed, simply:

pip install pywebview

To automatically fetch and install Python dependencies for your platform, install with the appropriate "install extras".

(Note that the same code is installed regardless; if more than one of the libraries below are available they will be tried in the order listed in this readme.)

On Windows (using WinForms with pythonnet):

pip install pywebview[winforms]

On Mac (using the Cocoa WebKit widget via pyobjc):

pip install pywebview[cocoa]

On Linux (using GTK3 via PyGObject):

pip install pywebview[gtk3]

On Linux or Mac with either Qt 4 or 5:

pip install pywebview[qt4]  # Qt4 with PyQt4
pip install pywebview[qt5]  # Qt5 with PyQt5

A second implementation for Windows using pywin32 and comtypes is also available:

pip install pywebview[win32]

Contributions and bug reports

Help, PRs and donations are welcome. If you found a bug, please test it first in a web-browser that is used by default for your operating system to see if the problem is with your code, rather than pywebview. Feature requests are welcome, but nothing is guaranteed.

Donate with Paypal: http://bit.ly/2eg2Z5P Donate with Bitcoin: 19VmMFEsJUk8t7HA17VVkQTyrZvMdhB9V6

Dependencies

Windows

On Windows you can choose between Win32 and Windows Forms implementation.

For Win32 you need pywin32, comtypes. ActiveState distribution of Python 2 comes with pywin32 preinstalled

For Windows Forms pythonnet

OS X

pyobjc. PyObjC comes presintalled with the Python bundled in OS X. For a stand-alone Python installation you have to install it separately.

Linux

For GTK3 based systems:PyGObject On Debian based systems run sudo apt-get install python-gi gir1.2-webkit-3.0

For QT based systems

Either PyQt4 or PyQt5

Usage

import webview

webview.create_window("It works, Jim!", "http://www.flowrl.com")

For more elaborated usage, refer to the examples in the examples directory. There is also a sample Flask application boilerplate provided in the examples/flask_app directory. It provides an application scaffold and boilerplate code for a real-world application.

API

webview.create_window(title, url="", width=800, height=600, resizable=True, fullscreen=False, min_size=(200, 100)), strings={} Create a new WebView window. Calling this function will block application execution, so you have to execute your program logic in a separate thread. strings is a dictionary with localized strings that overwrites default strings. Localized strings are defined in localization.py
webview.load_url(url) Load a new URL in the previously created WebView window. This function must be invoked after WebView windows is created with create_window(). Otherwise an exception is thrown.
webview.load_html(content) Loads HTML content in the WebView window
webview.create_file_dialog(dialog_type=OPEN_DIALOG, directory='', allow_multiple=False, save_filename='') Create an open file (webview.OPEN_DIALOG), open folder (webview.FOLDER_DIALOG) or save file (webview.SAVE_DIALOG) dialog. allow_multiple=True enables multiple selection. directory Initial directory. save_filename Default filename for save file dialog. Return a tuple of selected files, None if cancelled
webview.destroy_window() Destroy a webview window

What web renderer is used?

For OS X and Linux systems you get WebKit. The actual version depends on the version of installed Safari on OS X and QT / GTK on Linux.

For Windows, you get MSHTML (Trident) in all its glory. The version depends on the installed version of Internet Explorer. For Windows XP systems, you cannot get anything better than IE8. For Vista, you are limited to IE9. For Windows 7/8/10, you will get the latest installed version. Embedding EdgeHTML engine in third party applications is not supported by Microsoft at the moment.

How do I freeze my application?

Use py2app on OS X and py2exe/pyinstaller on Windows. For reference setup.py files, look in examples/py2app_setup.py and examples/py2exe_setup.py

kmryu / pywebview