This repository wraps the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) in Rust. CEF is a project that allows you to embed Chromium web views in native applications. You can read more about it here. A high level overview of CEF can be found here. Details about CEF C interop can be found here.
Rust bindgen is used to generate bindings against CEF's C API. Unit tests and comments have been stripped from the generated Rust bindings. Missing C types (like #define's) have been added manually. All generated CEF types are wrapped in sane Rust types that respect CEF's reference counting rules.
Here is an overview of all crates in the repository:
| Crate | Purpose |
|---|---|
cef-ui-sys |
The raw CEF C bindings. |
cef-ui |
The main CEF wrapper. |
cef-ui-helper |
The CEF helper wrapper (required on macOS). |
cef-ui-tools |
Tools for building the various binaries, and for generating the app bundle on macOS. |
cef-ui-util |
A library that contains tooling commands, functions to simplify linking, etc. |
cef-ui-simple |
The main binary for the simple example. |
cef-ui-simple-helper |
The helper binary for the simple example (required on macOS). |
The cef-ui-tools crate exists to deal with platform-specific issues in pure Rust. For example, on macOS, CEF will only function if it adheres to its app bundle structure.
If you're using VSCode, there are Debug and Release configurations. If you're on the command line, you can do the following:
cargo cef-build-debug
cargo cef-build-release
Once built, you can find the cef-ui-simple binary in the appropriate target folder. On macOS, you must run the generated app bundle.
The CEF binaries themselves are very large. We have provided stripped, postprocessed binaries as release artifacts on GitHub. When you create your binary targets that link against CEF, you must call link_cef and link_cef_helper (if on macOS) in your build.rs scripts. These functions automatically download the necessary CEF binaries into a folder in your repository (controlled by the CEF_WORKSPACE_DIR and CEF_ARTIFACTS_DIR environment variables) and copies the necessary binaries and files to the target directory alongside your executable.
The simple examples are built via binary targets in cef-ui-tools. On macOS, this builds not only cef-ui-simple, but also cef-ui-simple-helper, and generates the app bundle which is required by CEF.
This is a work in progress and is not complete. Many C types have not yet been wrapped. At present, we target version 121.3.15+g4d3b0b4+chromium-121.0.6167.184.
| Platform | Arch | Builds | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | x86_64 |
✔️ | cef_binary_121.3.15+g4d3b0b4+chromium-121.0.6167.184_linux64_minimal |
| macOS | arm64 |
✔️ | cef_binary_121.3.15+g4d3b0b4+chromium-121.0.6167.184_macosarm64_minimal |
| Windows | x86_64 |
✔️ | cef_binary_121.3.15+g4d3b0b4+chromium-121.0.6167.184_windows64_minimal |