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cef-rs

Use CEF in Rust.

Supported Targets

Target Linux macOS Windows
x86_64 ✅ ✅ ✅
ARM64 ✅ ✅ ✅

Usage

Nix (on Linux)

If you are using Nix on Linux with the nixpkgs channel configured, you can take advantage of the cef-binary package to share the CEF binaries across your system. Just set the NIX_CEF_BINARY environment variable before running any of these cargo commands.

export NIX_CEF_BINARY=1

You can still run export-cef-dir and set the CEF_PATH environment variable if you prefer, e.g., for build output caching, but it is not necessary. If you combine NIX_CEF_BINARY with export-cef-dir, even export-cef-dir will use Nix instead of directly downloading the CEF binaries.

Install Shared CEF Binaries

This step is optional, but it will make all other builds of the cef crate much faster (when not using NIX_CEF_BINARY). If you don't do this, the cef-dll-sys crate build.rs script will download and extract the same files under its OUT_DIR directory. You should repeat this step each time you upgrade to a new version of the cef crate.

Linux or macOS:

cargo run -p export-cef-dir -- --force $HOME/.local/share/cef

Windows (using PowerShell)

cargo run -p export-cef-dir -- --force $env:USERPROFILE/.local/share/cef

Set Environment Variables

Linux

export CEF_PATH="$HOME/.local/share/cef"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$CEF_PATH"

macOS

export CEF_PATH="$HOME/.local/share/cef"
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH="$DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH:$CEF_PATH:$CEF_PATH/Chromium Embedded Framework.framework/Libraries"

Windows (using PowerShell)

$env:CEF_PATH="$env:USERPROFILE/.local/share/cef"
$env:PATH="$env:PATH;$env:CEF_PATH"

Run the cefsimple Example

This command should work with each platform:

cargo run --bin bundle-cef-app -- cefsimple -o target/bundle

You can configure the name of the macOS helper in the Cargo.toml file, as well as a resource directory that will be copied into the bundle in a platform-appropriate location:

[package.metadata.cef.bundle]
helper_name = "cefsimple_helper"
resources_path = "resources"

Linux

There's an extra --release flag to build a much smaller bundle on Linux:

cargo run --bin bundle-cef-app -- cefsimple -o target/bundle --release
./target/bundle/cefsimple.exe

macOS

The macOS utility creates an application bundle directory at the target location, you can run it with the open command:

cargo run --bin bundle-cef-app -- cefsimple -o target/bundle
open target/bundle/cefsimple.app

On macOS, the bundle-cef-app utility also supports several additional bundle options, most of which default to the name of the application (e.g. cefsimple):

Usage: bundle-cef-app [OPTIONS] <NAME>

Arguments:
  <NAME>

Options:
  -o, --output <OUTPUT>
  -i, --identifier <IDENTIFIER>
  -d, --display-name <DISPLAY_NAME>
  -r, --region <REGION>              [default: English]
  -v, --version <VERSION>            [default: 1.0.0]
  -h, --help                         Print help

Windows (using PowerShell)

The Windows utility supports the --release flag, but it makes much less difference in the binary size than on Linux. It also does not copy the resources directory to the bundle, because the preferred mechanism on Windows is to link binary resources directly into the executable.

However, the utility will emit an executable manifest file, and if the sandbox feature is enabled, it will build the DLL (cdylib) target instead of the executable (bin) target, and copy that with a renamed bootstrap.exe file to the bundle directory, so you can run it from there directly:

cargo run --bin bundle-cef-app -- cefsimple -o ./target/bundle
./target/bundle/cefsimple.exe

Cross-compiling to Windows

The cef-dll-sys crate can be cross-compiled to x86_64-pc-windows-msvc from Linux with cargo-xwin, which downloads the Windows SDK and sets up a clang-cl toolchain for both Rust and CMake. Install clang, lld, llvm and ninja from your package manager (the MSVC STL headers require Clang 19 or newer; on Ubuntu 24.04 use apt.llvm.org), then:

rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
cargo install cargo-xwin
cargo xwin build --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

The libcef_dll_wrapper static library is built with clang-cl and the CEF runtime files are copied next to the output binaries, exactly like a native Windows build. The CEF_PATH environment variable works the same way as well: the Windows CEF binaries are downloaded into their own cef_windows_x86_64 directory next to the host ones.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.