Is Tarui zero-dependency in Production?

[axetroy]

For many teams, before using it, we must figure out a few things:

1. System dependencies (Updater/Notifier/Dialog/Tray)
2. Runtime dependencies (eg. MS lib in Windows)
3. System webview required?

Since it is compared with Electron, this is a very important factor. If the system cannot be installed/used because the system lacks dependencies, and the user needs to install the dependencies by himself, then it will be catastrophic

[FabianLars]

Linux:

• .deb declares its dependencies so the package manager will install them.
• AppIamge is self-contained as always. That means it includes all needed dependencies in itself.
  • Currently there are 1 or 2 bugs preventing them from being 100% cross-distro: [1] [2]
• as a side note, building on linux generally requires to build on the oldest system you want to support, mainly because of glibc :))) But this can cause problems with the webkit2gtk version (regarding important bug fixes).

macOS:

• depends on the system webkit, which should be always present (== afaik there isn't a way to remove it from the system)
  • obviously the webkit version on the users system dictates which html/css/js features are available.

windows:

• needs webview2 installed (at runtime)
  • preinstalled on windows 11
  • win7/8/10: the msi takes care of the installation, but the user has to accept the UAC prompt for the webview2 installer.
• needs a c++ redistributable (at runtime), also included in the msi

[amrbashir]

A final Tauri app will depend on a few things to exist on the user system for it to work properly.

• On Windows, you need vcredist14 and Webview2, most Windows systems will have vcredist installed as it is a common dependency for other apps too and Webview2 is pre-shipped in Win11 and hopefully Win10 will too but our bundler will still generate an .msi installer that will handle both of these dependencies (it will download the Webview2 installer and install it if needed).

• On linux, you need webkit2gtk and libappindicator and gtk which are probably installed on most Linux systems but our bundler will also take care of it if they are not, it will generate a .deb package that specifies its dependencies so the package manager will install them if they don't exist. Also our bundler can make an Appimage that has all the dependencies included (it is a bit buggy right now but it will get better). except gtk I think because it is usually already installed on Linux.

• On macOS, Afaik, nothing is needed, it will just work out of the box.

Edit: Apologies, didn't see that @FabianLars already responded with a beautiful detailed answer.