Fl4m3Ph03n1x

Fl4m3Ph03n1x

Making desktop apps in Elixir

Background

In my quest to make a desktop app with Elixir for Windows (I have given up the idea of doing multi-desktop apps for now) I am trying to create a HelloWorld Desktop app.

This app is basically what you get from running mix phx.new hello.
I am using Phoenix’s latest version, so I don’t have to deal with SASS nor anything alike, which honestly is a blessing since this means I don’t have any more node-gyp issues.

Making it desktop friendly

As some of you may have realized however, just creating a Phoenix project won’t make it a Desktop app.
This is where the Desktop project comes in:

This is a dependency that allows you to make your applications Desktop like.
Since I have run the Sample app in the past:

https://github.com/elixir-desktop/desktop-example-app

I figured I would try to tear it apart and try to launch the simplest, dummiest HelloWorld app I could.
Basically, when I run mix iex -S I want it to instead of opening a window in my browser for it to open a desktop app.

Problem

I have added all the dependencies and I have a somewhat similar project structure to what the sample app has:

mix.exs

defmodule Hello.Application do
  # See https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Application.html
  # for more information on OTP Applications
  @moduledoc false

  use Application

  @impl true
  def start(_type, _args) do
    children = [
      # Start the Telemetry supervisor
      HelloWeb.Telemetry,
      # Start the PubSub system
      {Phoenix.PubSub, name: Hello.PubSub},
      # Start the Endpoint (http/https)
      HelloWeb.Endpoint
      # Start a worker by calling: Hello.Worker.start_link(arg)
      # {Hello.Worker, arg}
    ]

    # See https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Supervisor.html
    # for other strategies and supported options
    opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: Hello.Supervisor]
    Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)
  end

  # Tell Phoenix to update the endpoint configuration
  # whenever the application is updated.
  @impl true
  def config_change(changed, _new, removed) do
    HelloWeb.Endpoint.config_change(changed, removed)
    :ok
  end
end

However, nothing I do works. There are no errors in the console, but the desktop app won’t start.
I am willing to throw everything away, all I want is to have a way of opening this in a desktop window.

I think there might be a config issue, but I can’t be sure since the sample app is done with an older version of Phoenix that uses SASS.

Question

Can someone help me figure out what is the MNE to have this open a desktop window?

Marked As Solved

dominicletz

dominicletz

Creator of Elixir Desktop

I’ve just had a chance to check the repo out and try it. There are a couple of issues here:

  • It wasn’t using Desktop.Endpoint but Phoenix.Endpoint in your endpoint.ex
  • There are two applications in hello.ex and application.ex the only one used was application.ex but that did not start the Desktop.Window.
  • There are icons referenced that don’t exist: icon.png, icon32x32-done.png
  • config.exs did not configure the HTTP port to be 0
  • menu.eex had an <menubar> element that is not valid there.

I’ve supplied a PR to make it run:
https://github.com/Fl4m3Ph03n1x/hello-desktop/pull/1

P.S.
Best to double check the supervision tree. At the moment hello.ex and sup.ex are not used, so you might either delete them or embed them in the supervision tree that is started from application.ex

Cheers!

Also Liked

arjan

arjan

Looking at the example repo I think you also need to include a Desktop.Window child process in your supervision tree?

dominicletz

dominicletz

Creator of Elixir Desktop

Just looking at the code check your hello.ex you still have a reference to ‘TodoWeb’ there from the example. Replace that with HelloWeb.

{:ok, _} = Supervisor.start_child(sup, TodoWeb.Sup)

Where Next?

Popular in Questions Top

rms.mrcs
Hi, I need to transform a list of numbers into a map where the keys are the indexes and the values are the original values of the list. ...
New
openscript
Hello! Sorry for this astonishing simple question, but I’m really stuck. I try to set up the intellij-elixir plugin, but I don’t know ho...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
About me? ( if you have nothing better to do than reading about some random guy in the internet :stuck_out_tongue: ) Hello all, this is ...
New
greenz1
I have a phoenix application from which a user can download multiple(5-6) files of size 1MB. I couldn’t find anything related to sending ...
New
bsollish-terakeet
Credo is smart enough to check for (something like) this: assert length(the_list) == 0 with this response: Checking if an enum is empt...
New
siddhant3030
Hi, I have to write a raw query for one of my project. But till now I have used ecto queries and don’t have much experience writing raw ...
New
vrod
I am using the Starship cross-shell prompt – it seems pretty nice, but I get some errors: [WARN] - (starship::utils): Executing command ...
New

Other popular topics Top

electic
Hi, I am new to Elixir. I am trying to use the DateTime component to insert a date into MySQL however the there seems to be no way to fo...
New
jononomo
For some reason my phoenix channels are working for me in my local dev environment, but as soon as I deploy via Docker, I get a 403 error...
New
Darmani72
If I have a post route which an argument: post /my_post_route/:my_param1, MyController.my_post_handler How would get the post params ...
New
aadeshere1
I have a another noob question about loop. Since elixir is immutable, while loop is not directly possible. total = 10 while total != 0 ...
New
msaraiva
Surface is an experimental library built on top of Phoenix LiveView and its new LiveComponent API that aims to provide a more declarative...
564 44265 214
New
sergio
Kind of like when jquery came out, it was super necessary. Existing drag and drop libraries have a bunch of baggage to support old browse...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement