I Shipped a 600 KB Native Desktop App with the Same HTML I'd Put on Vercel

🔗 Code: https://github.com/dev48v/tauri-from-zero
🧠 3-tier learning page: https://dev48v.infy.uk/tech/day43-tauri.html

Day 43 of my TechFromZero series. A new technology every day, every line of code explained.

Today: Tauri 2 — the Rust + native-webview framework for shipping desktop apps from web tech. Same HTML/CSS/JS you'd put on Vercel, but bundled as a 600 KB native binary instead of a URL.

For comparison: an equivalent Electron app is about 120 MB. Tauri is 200× smaller.

Why this matters

If you have VS Code + Slack + Discord + Notion + Spotify open on your laptop right now, that's five separate Chromium runtimes eating RAM. Every Electron app ships its own browser. The cost compounds.

Tauri's bet: every modern OS already ships a high-quality web renderer. WebView2 (Edge Chromium) on Windows. WKWebView (Safari) on macOS. WebKitGTK on Linux. Tauri's Rust core wraps these and skips the runtime tax entirely.

The frontend code is identical. The shipping is the only thing that changes.

How it works in 3 ideas

Idea 1 — Native window wraps a webview

Tauri's Rust core (wry crate) opens an OS-native window and points the OS's webview at your HTML. From the user's perspective it's a native app. From your code's perspective it's still a browser tab.

Idea 2 — Bridge JS ↔ Rust via invoke()

Annotate any Rust function with #[tauri::command] and JS can call it:

#[tauri::command]
fn get_cpu_count() -> usize {
    std::thread::available_parallelism()
        .map(|n| n.get())
        .unwrap_or(1)
}

From the frontend:

import { invoke } from "@tauri-apps/api/core";
const cpus = await invoke("get_cpu_count");

Args + return are serialized as JSON across the bridge. Use Rust for everything the browser sandbox can't reach: filesystem, system info, OS notifications, clipboard, native dialogs, IPC, anything in the Rust ecosystem.

Idea 3 — Allowlist security model

Electron exposes Node.js to the JS layer — any compromised npm dependency can read your home directory. Tauri inverts that: NOTHING is exposed unless you explicitly enable it in tauri.conf.json:

{
  "plugins": {
    "fs": { "scope": ["$HOME/Documents/*"] },
    "shell": { "open": true }
  }
}

The surface area is the part you opt into. Default is zero. This is a much safer default for a downloadable binary.

Build it in 30 minutes

# 1. Install Rust (one time)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# 2. Scaffold a Tauri app
npm create tauri-app@latest tauri-from-zero
cd tauri-from-zero
npm install

# 3. Run in dev mode (opens native window)
npm run tauri dev

# 4. Build release binary for your OS
npm run tauri build

First cargo build takes ~5 minutes (the Rust crate graph). Subsequent builds are seconds.

The release binary lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/:

• macOS → .app + .dmg
• Windows → .exe + .msi
• Linux → .AppImage + .deb + .rpm

Wire up GitHub Actions with the official tauri-apps/tauri-action and one git push builds all three from a single CI matrix.

What this unlocks

Three distributions, one frontend codebase:

1. 🌐 Website — same HTML/JS on Vercel
2. 🪟 Desktop app — Tauri (this article)
3. 📱 Mobile app — Tauri Mobile (in beta)

The Indie hacker dream: write the UI once, distribute everywhere.

Mass-market apps shipping on Tauri today include Spacedrive (file manager), Pot (translator), Mailspring (email client), and dozens more on https://tauri.app/showcase.

What's NOT in this article

• Auto-updates — Tauri ships an updater plugin (signed binaries, delta updates). Real product needs this.
• Multi-window — Tauri can spawn multiple OS windows for the same app instance.
• Sidecar binaries — Bundle external CLIs (yt-dlp, ffmpeg) and call from Rust.
• Plugin ecosystem — Tauri has plugins for SQL, store, notifications, deep links, biometrics, more.

The 8 commits in the repo are the floor. Everything else is layers on top.

Try it now

git clone https://github.com/dev48v/tauri-from-zero
cd tauri-from-zero
npm install
npm run tauri dev

Or open the 3-tier learning page on the showcase site:
https://dev48v.infy.uk/tech/day43-tauri.html

What's next in TechFromZero

Day 44 picks tomorrow. Probably one of: Convex (reactive backend), TanStack Start (new SSR framework), View Transitions API, or Bun + Elysia.

🌐 All days: https://dev48v.infy.uk/techfromzero.php