Wails Blog

Alpha 10 Released - A New Chapter for Wails

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Alpha 10 Released - A New Chapter for Wails

We’re thrilled to announce the release of Wails v3 Alpha 10 - and it’s big! While our release cadence may have seemed slow recently, there’s been an incredible amount of work happening behind the scenes. Today marks not just another release, but a shift in how we approach the development of Wails.

Why the Wait?

Like many development teams, we fell into the trap of trying to achieve perfection before each release. We wanted to squash every bug, polish every feature, and ensure everything was just right. But here’s the thing - software is never truly bug-free, and waiting for that mythical state only delays getting improvements into your hands.

Our New Release Strategy

Starting today, we’re adopting a daily release strategy. Any new changes merged during the day will be released at the end of that day. This approach will:

Get bug fixes and features to you faster
Provide more frequent feedback loops
Speed up our journey to Beta
Make the development process more transparent

This means you might see more frequent, smaller releases rather than occasional large ones. We believe this will benefit everyone in the Wails community.

How You Can Help

We’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people wanting to contribute to Wails! To make it easier for contributors to get involved, we’re implementing a new system:

Firstly, we are opening up bug reporting for alpha releases. The frequent releases allow us to do this.
Issues marked with “Ready for Work” are open for community contributions
These issues have clear requirements and are ready to be tackled
Most importantly, we need people testing PRs - this is one of the most valuable contributions you can make

Testing doesn’t require deep knowledge of the codebase, but it provides immense value by ensuring changes work across different environments and use cases.

What’s Next?

With our new daily release strategy, expect to see rapid progress toward Beta. We’re committed to maintaining momentum and getting Wails v3 to a stable release as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality.

And who knows? There might be a few surprises along the way… 😉

Thank You

To everyone who has contributed code, tested releases, reported bugs, or simply used Wails - thank you. Your support and feedback drive this project forward.

Here’s to more frequent releases, faster iteration, and an exciting journey ahead!

Want to get involved? Check out our GitHub repository for issues marked “ready for work”, or join our community to help test the latest changes.

The Road to Wails v3

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Wails is a project that simplifies the ability to write cross-platform desktop applications using Go. It uses native webview components for the frontend (not embedded browsers), bringing the power of the world’s most popular UI system to Go, whilst remaining lightweight.

Version 2 was released on the 22nd of September 2022 and brought with it a lot of enhancements including:

Live development, leveraging the popular Vite project
Rich functionality for managing windows and creating menus
Microsoft’s WebView2 component
Generation of Typescript models that mirror your Go structs
Creating of NSIS Installer
Obfuscated builds

Right now, Wails v2 provides powerful tooling for creating rich, cross-platform desktop applications.

This blog post aims to look at where the project is at right now and what we can improve on moving forward.

Where are we now?

It’s been incredible to see the popularity of Wails rising since the v2 release. I’m constantly amazed by the creativity of the community and the wonderful things that are being built with it. With more popularity, comes more eyes on the project. And with that, more feature requests and bug reports.

Over time, I’ve been able to identify some of the most pressing issues facing the project. I’ve also been able to identify some of the things that are holding the project back.

Current issues

I’ve identified the following areas that I feel are holding the project back:

The API
Bindings generation
The Build System

The API

The API to build a Wails application currently consists of 2 parts:

The Application API
The Runtime API

The Application API famously has only 1 function: Run() which takes a heap of options which govern how the application will work. Whilst this is very simple to use, it is also very limiting. It is a “declarative” approach which hides a lot of the underlying complexity. For instance, there is no handle to the main window, so you can’t interact with it directly. For that, you need to use the Runtime API. This is a problem when you start to want to do more complex things like create multiple windows.

The Runtime API provides a lot of utility functions for the developer. This includes:

Window management
Dialogs
Menus
Events
Logs

There are a number of things I am not happy with the Runtime API. The first is that it requires a “context” to be passed around. This is both frustrating and confusing for new developers who pass in a context and then get a runtime error.

The biggest issue with the Runtime API is that it was designed for applications that only use a single window. Over time, the demand for multiple windows has grown and the API is not well suited to this.

Thoughts on the v3 API

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something like this?

func main() {
    app := wails.NewApplication(options.App{})
    myWindow := app.NewWindow(options.Window{})
    myWindow.SetTitle("My Window")
    myWindow.On(events.Window.Close, func() {
        app.Quit()
    })
    app.Run()
}

This programmatic approach is far more intuitive and allows the developer to interact with the application elements directly. All current runtime methods for windows would simply be methods on the window object. For the other runtime methods, we could move them to the application object like so:

app := wails.NewApplication(options.App{})
app.NewInfoDialog(options.InfoDialog{})
app.Log.Info("Hello World")

This is a much more powerful API which will allow for more complex applications to be built. It also allows for the creation of multiple windows, the most up-voted feature on GitHub:

func main() {
    app := wails.NewApplication(options.App{})
    myWindow := app.NewWindow(options.Window{})
    myWindow.SetTitle("My Window")
    myWindow.On(events.Window.Close, func() {
        app.Quit()
    })
    myWindow2 := app.NewWindow(options.Window{})
    myWindow2.SetTitle("My Window 2")
    myWindow2.On(events.Window.Close, func() {
        app.Quit()
    })
    app.Run()
}

Bindings generation

One of the key features of Wails is generating bindings for your Go methods so they may be called from Javascript. The current method for doing this is a bit of a hack. It involves building the application with a special flag and then running the resultant binary which uses reflection to determine what has been bound. This leads to a bit of a chicken and egg situation: You can’t build the application without the bindings and you can’t generate the bindings without building the application. There are many ways around this but the best one would be not to use this approach at all.

There were a number of attempts at writing a static analyser for Wails projects but they didn’t get very far. In more recent times, it has become slightly easier to do this with more material available on the subject.

Compared to reflection, the AST approach is much faster however it is significantly more complicated. To start with, we may need to impose certain constraints on how to specify bindings in the code. The goal is to support the most common use cases and then expand it later on.

The Build System

Like the declarative approach to the API, the build system was created to hide the complexities of building a desktop application. When you run wails build, it does a lot of things behind the scenes:

Builds the backend binary for bindings and generates the bindings
Installs the frontend dependencies
Builds the frontend assets
Determines if the application icon is present and if so, embeds it
Builds the final binary
If the build is for darwin/universal it builds 2 binaries, one for darwin/amd64 and one for darwin/arm64 and then creates a fat binary using lipo
If compression is required, it compresses the binary with UPX
Determines if this binary is to be packaged and if so:
- Ensures the icon and application manifest are compiled into the binary (Windows)
- Builds out the application bundle, generates the icon bundle and copies it, the binary and Info.plist to the application bundle (Mac)
If an NSIS installer is required, it builds it

This entire process, whilst very powerful, is also very opaque. It is very difficult to customise it and it is very difficult to debug.

To address this in v3, I would like to move to a build system that exists outside of Wails. After using Task for a while, I am a big fan of it. It is a great tool for configuring build systems and should be reasonably familiar to anyone who has used Makefiles.

The build system would be configured using a Taskfile.yml file which would be generated by default with any of the supported templates. This would have all of the steps required to do all the current tasks, such as building or packaging the application, allowing for easy customisation.

There will be no external requirement for this tooling as it would form part of the Wails CLI. This means that you can still use wails build and it will do all the things it does today. However, if you want to customise the build process, you can do so by editing the Taskfile.yml file. It also means you can easily understand the build steps and use your own build system if you wish.

The missing piece in the build puzzle is the atomic operations in the build process, such as icon generation, compression and packaging. To require a bunch of external tooling would not be a great experience for the developer. To address this, the Wails CLI will provide all these capabilities as part of the CLI. This means that the builds still work as expected, with no extra external tooling, however you can replace any step of the build with any tool you like.

This will be a much more transparent build system which will allow for easier customisation and address a lot of the issues that have been raised around it.

The Payoff

These positive changes will be a huge benefit to the project:

The new API will be much more intuitive and will allow for more complex applications to be built.
Using static analysis for bindings generation will be much faster and reduce a lot of the complexity around the current process.
Using an established, external build system will make the build process completely transparent, allowing for powerful customisation.

Benefits to the project maintainers are:

The new API will be much easier to maintain and adapt to new features and platforms.
The new build system will be much easier to maintain and extend. I hope this will lead to a new ecosystem of community driven build pipelines.
Better separation of concerns within the project. This will make it easier to add new features and platforms.

The Plan

A lot of the experimentation for this has already been done and it’s looking good. There is no current timeline for this work but I’m hoping by the end of Q1 2023, there will be an alpha release for Mac to allow the community to test, experiment with and provide feedback.

Summary

The v2 API is declarative, hides a lot from the developer and not suitable for features such as multiple windows. A new API will be created which will be simpler, intuitive and more powerful.
The build system is opaque and difficult to customise so we will move to an external build system which will open it all up.
The bindings generation is slow and complex so we will move to static analysis which will remove a lot of the complexity the current method has.

There has been a lot of work put into the guts of v2 and it’s solid. It’s now time to address the layer on top of it and make it a much better experience for the developer.

I hope you are as excited about this as I am. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

Regards,

‐ Lea

PS: If you or your company find Wails useful, please consider sponsoring the project. Thanks!

PPS: Yes, that’s a genuine screenshot of a multi-window application built with Wails. It’s not a mockup. It’s real. It’s awesome. It’s coming soon.

Wails v2 Released

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

It’s here!

Today marks the release of Wails v2. It’s been about 18 months since the first v2 alpha and about a year from the first beta release. I’m truly grateful to everyone involved in the evolution of the project.

Part of the reason it took that long was due to wanting to get to some definition of completeness before officially calling it v2. The truth is, there’s never a perfect time to tag a release - there’s always outstanding issues or “just one more” feature to squeeze in. What tagging an imperfect major release does do, however, is to provide a bit of stability for users of the project, as well as a bit of a reset for the developers.

This release is more than I’d ever expected it to be. I hope it gives you as much pleasure as it has given us to develop it.

What is Wails?

If you are unfamiliar with Wails, it is a project that enables Go programmers to provide rich frontends for their Go programs using familiar web technologies. It’s a lightweight, Go alternative to Electron. Much more information can be found on the official site.

What’s new?

The v2 release is a huge leap forward for the project, addressing many of the pain points of v1. If you have not read any of the blog posts on the Beta releases for macOS, Windows or Linux, then I encourage you to do so as it covers all the major changes in more detail. In summary:

Webview2 component for Windows that supports modern web standards and debugging capabilities.
Dark / Light theme + custom theming on Windows.
Windows now has no CGO requirements.
Out-of-the-box support for Svelte, Vue, React, Preact, Lit & Vanilla project templates.
Vite integration providing a hot-reload development environment for your application.
Native application menus and dialogs.
Native window translucency effects for Windows and macOS. Support for Mica & Acrylic backdrops.
Easily generate an NSIS installer for Windows deployments.
A rich runtime library providing utility methods for window manipulation, eventing, dialogs, menus and logging.
Support for obfuscating your application using garble.
Support for compressing your application using UPX.
Automatic TypeScript generation of Go structs. More info here.
No extra libraries or DLLs are required to be shipped with your application. For any platform.
No requirement to bundle frontend assets. Just develop your application like any other web application.

Credit & Thanks

Getting to v2 has been a huge effort. There have been ~2.2K commits by 89 contributors between the initial alpha and the release today, and many, many more that have provided translations, testing, feedback and help on the discussion forums as well as the issue tracker. I’m so unbelievably grateful to each one of you. I’d also like to give an extra special thank you to all the project sponsors who have provided guidance, advice and feedback. Everything you do is hugely appreciated.

There are a few people I’d like to give special mention to:

Firstly, a huge thank you to @stffabi who has provided so many contributions which we all benefit from, as well as providing a lot of support on many issues. He has provided some key features such as the external dev server support which transformed our dev mode offering by allowing us to hook into Vite’s superpowers. It’s fair to say that Wails v2 would be a far less exciting release without his incredible contributions. Thank you so much @stffabi!

I’d also like to give a huge shout-out to @misitebao who has tirelessly been maintaining the website, as well as providing Chinese translations, managing Crowdin and helping new translators get up to speed. This is a hugely important task, and I’m extremely grateful for all the time and effort put into this! You rock!

Last, but not least, a huge thank you to Mat Ryer who has provided advice and support during the development of v2. Writing xBar together using an early Alpha of v2 was helpful in shaping the direction of v2, as well as give me an understanding of some design flaws in the early releases. I’m happy to announce that as of today, we will start to port xBar to Wails v2, and it will become the flagship application for the project. Cheers Mat!

Lessons Learnt

There are a number of lessons learnt in getting to v2 that will shape development moving forward.

Smaller, Quicker, Focused Releases

In the course of developing v2, there were many features and bug fixes that were developed on an ad-hoc basis. This led to longer release cycles and were harder to debug. Moving forward, we are going to create releases more often that will include a reduced number of features. A release will involve updates to documentation as well as thorough testing. Hopefully, these smaller, quicker, focussed releases will lead to fewer regressions and better quality documentation.

Encourage Engagement

When starting this project, I wanted to immediately help everyone who had a problem. Issues were “personal” and I wanted them resolved as quickly as possible. This is unsustainable and ultimately works against the longevity of the project. Moving forward, I will be giving more space for people to get involved in answering questions and triaging issues. It would be good to get some tooling to help with this so if you have any suggestions, please join in the discussion here.

Learning to say No

The more people that engage with an Open Source project, the more requests there will be for additional features that may or may not be useful to the majority of people. These features will take an initial amount of time to develop and debug, and incur an ongoing maintenance cost from that point on. I myself am the most guilty of this, often wanting to “boil the sea” rather than provide the minimum viable feature. Moving forward, we will need to say “No” a bit more to adding core features and focus our energies on a way to empower developers to provide that functionality themselves. We are looking seriously into plugins for this scenario. This will allow anyone to extend the project as they see fit, as well as providing an easy way to contribute towards the project.

Looking to the Future

There are so many core features we are looking at to add to Wails in the next major development cycle already. The roadmap is full of interesting ideas, and I’m keen to start work on them. One of the big asks has been for multiple window support. It’s a tricky one and to do it right, and we may need to look at providing an alternative API, as the current one was not designed with this in mind. Based on some preliminary ideas and feedback, I think you’ll like where we’re looking to go with it.

I’m personally very excited at the prospect of getting Wails apps running on mobile. We already have a demo project showing that it is possible to run a Wails app on Android, so I’m really keen to explore where we can go with this!

A final point I’d like to raise is that of feature parity. It has long been a core principle that we wouldn’t add anything to the project without there being full cross-platform support for it. Whilst this has proven to be (mainly) achievable so far, it has really held the project back in releasing new features. Moving forward, we will be adopting a slightly different approach: any new feature that cannot be immediately released for all platforms will be released under an experimental configuration or API. This allows early adopters on certain platforms to try the feature and provide feedback that will feed into the final design of the feature. This, of course, means that there are no guarantees of API stability until it is fully supported by all the platforms it can be supported on, but at least it will unblock development.

Final Words

I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to achieve with the V2 release. It’s amazing to see what people have already been able to build using the beta releases so far. Quality applications like Varly, Surge and October. I encourage you to check them out.

This release was achieved through the hard work of many contributors. Whilst it is free to download and use, it has not come about through zero cost. Make no mistakes, this project has come at considerable cost. It has not only been my time and the time of each and every contributor, but also the cost of absence from friends and families of each of those people too. That’s why I’m extremely grateful for every second that has been dedicated to making this project happen. The more contributors we have, the more this effort can be spread out and the more we can achieve together. I’d like to encourage you all to pick one thing that you can contribute, whether it is confirming someone’s bug, suggesting a fix, making a documentation change or helping out someone who needs it. All of these small things have such a huge impact! It would be so awesome if you too were part of the story in getting to v3.

Enjoy!

‐ Lea

PS: If you or your company find Wails useful, please consider sponsoring the project. Thanks!

Wails v2 Beta for Linux

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I’m pleased to finally announce that Wails v2 is now in beta for Linux! It is somewhat ironic that the very first experiments with v2 was on Linux and yet it has ended up as the last release. That being said, the v2 we have today is very different from those first experiments. So without further ado, let’s go over the new features:

New Features

There were a lot of requests for native menu support. Wails has finally got you covered. Application menus are now available and include support for most native menu features. This includes standard menu items, checkboxes, radio groups, submenus and separators.

There were a huge number of requests in v1 for the ability to have greater control of the window itself. I’m happy to announce that there’s new runtime APIs specifically for this. It’s feature-rich and supports multi-monitor configurations. There is also an improved dialogs API: Now, you can have modern, native dialogs with rich configuration to cater for all your dialog needs.

No requirement to bundle assets

A huge pain-point of v1 was the need to condense your entire application down to single JS & CSS files. I’m happy to announce that for v2, there is no requirement to bundle assets, in any way, shape or form. Want to load a local image? Use an <../../../assets/blog-images> tag with a local src path. Want to use a cool font? Copy it in and add the path to it in your CSS.

Wow, that sounds like a webserver…

Yes, it works just like a webserver, except it isn’t.

So how do I include my assets?

You just pass a single embed.FS that contains all your assets into your application configuration. They don’t even need to be in the top directory - Wails will just work it out for you.

New Development Experience

Now that assets don’t need to be bundled, it’s enabled a whole new development experience. The new wails dev command will build and run your application, but instead of using the assets in the embed.FS, it loads them directly from disk.

It also provides the additional features:

Hot reload - Any changes to frontend assets will trigger an auto reload of the application frontend
Auto rebuild - Any changes to your Go code will rebuild and relaunch your application

In addition to this, a webserver will start on port 34115. This will serve your application to any browser that connects to it. All connected web browsers will respond to system events like hot reload on asset change.

In Go, we are used to dealing with structs in our applications. It’s often useful to send structs to our frontend and use them as state in our application. In v1, this was a very manual process and a bit of a burden on the developer. I’m happy to announce that in v2, any application run in dev mode will automatically generate TypeScript models for all structs that are input or output parameters to bound methods. This enables seamless interchange of data models between the two worlds.

In addition to this, another JS module is dynamically generated wrapping all your bound methods. This provides JSDoc for your methods, providing code completion and hinting in your IDE. It’s really cool when you get data models auto-imported when hitting tab in an auto-generated module wrapping your Go code!

Remote Templates

Getting an application up and running quickly was always a key goal for the Wails project. When we launched, we tried to cover a lot of the modern frameworks at the time: react, vue and angular. The world of frontend development is very opinionated, fast moving and hard to keep on top of! As a result, we found our base templates getting out of date pretty quickly and this caused a maintenance headache. It also meant that we didn’t have cool modern templates for the latest and greatest tech stacks.

With v2, I wanted to empower the community by giving you the ability to create and host templates yourselves, rather than rely on the Wails project. So now you can create projects using community supported templates! I hope this will inspire developers to create a vibrant ecosystem of project templates. I’m really quite excited about what our developer community can create!

Cross Compilation to Windows

Because Wails v2 for Windows is pure Go, you can target Windows builds without docker.

In Conclusion

As I’d said in the Windows release notes, Wails v2 represents a new foundation for the project. The aim of this release is to get feedback on the new approach, and to iron out any bugs before a full release. Your input would be most welcome! Please direct any feedback to the v2 Beta discussion board.

Linux is hard to support. We expect there to be a number of quirks with the beta. Please help us to help you by filing detailed bug reports!

Finally, I’d like to give a special thank you to all the project sponsors whose support drives the project in many ways behind the scenes.

I look forward to seeing what people build with Wails in this next exciting phase of the project!

Lea.

PS: The v2 release isn’t far off now!

PPS: If you or your company find Wails useful, please consider sponsoring the project. Thanks!

Wails v2 Beta for MacOS

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Today marks the first beta release of Wails v2 for Mac! It’s taken quite a while to get to this point and I’m hoping that today’s release will give you something that’s reasonably useful. There have been a number of twists and turns to get to this point and I’m hoping, with your help, to iron out the crinkles and get the Mac port polished for the final v2 release.

You mean this isn’t ready for production? For your use case, it may well be ready, but there are still a number of known issues so keep your eye on this project board and if you would like to contribute, you’d be very welcome!

So what’s new for Wails v2 for Mac vs v1? Hint: It’s pretty similar to the Windows Beta :wink:

New Features

Mac Specific Options

In addition to the normal application options, Wails v2 for Mac also brings some Mac extras:

Make your window all funky and translucent, like all the pretty swift apps!
Highly customisable titlebar
We support the NSAppearance options for the application
Simple config to auto-create an “About” menu

No requirement to bundle assets

A huge pain-point of v1 was the need to condense your entire application down to single JS & CSS files. I’m happy to announce that for v2, there is no requirement to bundle assets, in any way, shape or form. Want to load a local image? Use an <img> tag with a local src path. Want to use a cool font? Copy it in and add the path to it in your CSS.

Wow, that sounds like a webserver…

Yes, it works just like a webserver, except it isn’t.

So how do I include my assets?

You just pass a single embed.FS that contains all your assets into your application configuration. They don’t even need to be in the top directory - Wails will just work it out for you.

New Development Experience

It also provides the additional features:

Hot reload - Any changes to frontend assets will trigger and auto reload of the application frontend
Auto rebuild - Any changes to your Go code will rebuild and relaunch your application

Remote Templates

Native M1 Support

Thanks to the amazing support of Mat Ryer, the Wails project now supports M1 native builds:

You can also specify darwin/amd64 as a target too:

Oh, I almost forgot… you can also do darwin/universal… :wink:

Cross Compilation to Windows

Because Wails v2 for Windows is pure Go, you can target Windows builds without docker.

WKWebView Renderer

V1 relied on a (now deprecated) WebView component. V2 uses the most recent WKWebKit component so expect the latest and greatest from Apple.

In Conclusion

And finally, I’d like to give a special thank you to all the project sponsors, including JetBrains, whose support drive the project in many ways behind the scenes.

I look forward to seeing what people build with Wails in this next exciting phase of the project!

Lea.

PS: Linux users, you’re next!

PPS: If you or your company find Wails useful, please consider sponsoring the project. Thanks!

Wails v2 Beta for Windows

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

When I first announced Wails on Reddit, just over 2 years ago from a train in Sydney, I did not expect it to get much attention. A few days later, a prolific tech vlogger released a tutorial video, gave it a positive review and from that point on, interest in the project has skyrocketed.

It was clear that people were excited about adding web frontends to their Go projects, and almost immediately pushed the project beyond the proof of concept that I had created. At the time, Wails used the webview project to handle the frontend, and the only option for Windows was the IE11 renderer. Many bug reports were rooted in this limitation: poor JavaScript/CSS support and no dev tools to debug it. This was a frustrating development experience but there wasn’t much that could have been done to rectify it.

For a long time, I’d firmly believed that Microsoft would eventually have to sort out their browser situation. The world was moving on, frontend development was booming and IE wasn’t cutting it. When Microsoft announced the move to using Chromium as the basis for their new browser direction, I knew it was only a matter of time until Wails could use it, and move the Windows developer experience to the next level.

Today, I am pleased to announce: Wails v2 Beta for Windows! There’s a huge amount to unpack in this release, so grab a drink, take a seat and we’ll begin…

No CGO Dependency!

No, I’m not joking: No CGO dependency 🤯! The thing about Windows is that, unlike MacOS and Linux, it doesn’t come with a default compiler. In addition, CGO requires a mingw compiler and there’s a ton of different installation options. Removing the CGO requirement has massively simplified setup, as well as making debugging an awful lot easier. Whilst I have put a fair bit of effort in getting this working, the majority of the credit should go to John Chadwick for not only starting a couple of projects to make this possible, but also being open to someone taking those projects and building on them. Credit also to Tad Vizbaras whose winc project started me down this path.

WebView2 Chromium Renderer

Finally, Windows developers get a first class rendering engine for their applications! Gone are the days of contorting your frontend code to work on Windows. On top of that, you get a first-class developer tools experience!

The WebView2 component does, however, have a requirement to have the WebView2Loader.dll sitting alongside the binary. This makes distribution just that little bit more painful than we gophers are used to. All solutions and libraries (that I know of) that use WebView2 have this dependency.

However, I’m really excited to announce that Wails applications have no such requirement! Thanks to the wizardry of John Chadwick, we are able to bundle this dll inside the binary and get Windows to load it as if it were present on disk.

Gophers rejoice! The single binary dream lives on!

New Features

There is now the option to generate IDE configuration along with your project. This means that if you open your project in a supported IDE, it will already be configured for building and debugging your application. Currently VSCode is supported but we hope to support other IDEs such as Goland soon.

No requirement to bundle assets

A huge pain-point of v1 was the need to condense your entire application down to single JS & CSS files. I’m happy to announce that for v2, there is no requirement to bundle assets, in any way, shape or form. Want to load a local image? Use an <img> tag with a local src path. Want to use a cool font? Copy it in and add the path to it in your CSS.

Wow, that sounds like a webserver…

Yes, it works just like a webserver, except it isn’t.

So how do I include my assets?

You just pass a single embed.FS that contains all your assets into your application configuration. They don’t even need to be in the top directory - Wails will just work it out for you.

New Development Experience

It also provides the additional features:

Hot reload - Any changes to frontend assets will trigger and auto reload of the application frontend
Auto rebuild - Any changes to your Go code will rebuild and relaunch your application

Remote Templates

In Conclusion

Wails v2 represents a new foundation for the project. The aim of this release is to get feedback on the new approach, and to iron out any bugs before a full release. Your input would be most welcome. Please direct any feedback to the v2 Beta discussion board.

There were many twists and turns, pivots and u-turns to get to this point. This was due partly to early technical decisions that needed changing, and partly because some core problems we had spent time building workarounds for were fixed upstream: Go’s embed feature is a good example. Fortunately, everything came together at the right time, and today we have the very best solution that we can have. I believe the wait has been worth it - this would not have been possible even 2 months ago.

I also need to give a huge thank you :pray: to the following people because without them, this release just wouldn’t exist:

Misite Bao - An absolute workhorse on the Chinese translations and an incredible bug finder.
John Chadwick - His amazing work on go-webview2 and go-winloader have made the Windows version we have today possible.
Tad Vizbaras - Experimenting with his winc project was the first step down the path to a pure Go Wails.
Mat Ryer - His support, encouragement and feedback has really helped drive the project forward.

And finally, I’d like to give a special thank you to all the project sponsors, including JetBrains, whose support drives the project in many ways behind the scenes.

I look forward to seeing what people build with Wails in this next exciting phase of the project!

Lea.

PS: MacOS and Linux users need not feel left out - porting to this new foundation is actively under way and most of the hard work has already been done. Hang in there!

PPS: If you or your company find Wails useful, please consider sponsoring the project. Thanks!