Developing a Tauri app over SSH

[GeckoEidechse]

Introduction

I have a laptop that is quite weak and compiling any Rust project, especially one with many dependencies can take quite a long time. At the same I have remote access to a desktop that is powerful. As such doing development via a remote connection, e.g. using Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH is nice way to work on a light and mobile device while also having access to powerful hardware.

Problem

Now developing GUI applications remotely is always a struggle.
Either one has to initiate a remote desktop session, X-forwarding (if on X11), or stub out the GUI aspects of the application and rely solely on CLI inputs.

Overall, all approaches have some drawback, remote desktop or X-forwarding means larger latency and higher data transmission (i.e. sending each frame of the application/desktop) and relying solely on CLI inputs means any GUI development is completely impossible.

Solution?

This is where technologies like Electron or Tauri (👀) have their advantage as the GUI aspect of the application can be run entirely in the browser.

This means we could simply launch an SSH Tunnel to our remote development machine and load (the GUI part of) our application in the browser like we would a normal webpage.

For a taste of this, one can setup their dev environment to tell Tauri to load the GUI from a local webserver as described in this YouTube video.

When set up like this one can also just access the GUI part via a browser.

Now the issue is that any invoke() call simply won't work when run in the browser as it tries to call into some native function(?).

As such for this setup to work we would need some form of proxy that basically turns every invoke() into a call to the proxy itself and then the proxy would pass the call and arguments to the native function, as well as returning the results of the function call.

So the setup would look something like this

graph LR
    C[Client Browser] <-- SSH Tunnel --> P(Tauri proxy)
    P <--> A[Tauri App]

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Drawbacks

This approach is not without drawbacks. Most importantly native elements of Tauri do not translate to a browser session and would have to be either simulated/converted to HTML UI elements or would simply stay inaccessible.

[SkyfallWasTaken]

Hey, did you find another way to do this in the end?

[GeckoEidechse]

My solution was to get a more powerful laptop ._.

[SkyfallWasTaken]

Well that sucks :(

Thanks for replying though!

[SkyfallWasTaken]

Update: my awful, janky solution is this:

• Run cargo tauri dev - the app should crash. If it doesn't, Ctrl+C
• Run vite dev or whatever your dev command is to start the live server
• When you want to start the app, run these commands:

rsync ./airhorn [email protected]:~/projects/airhorn/target/debug/airhorn
./airhorn

The stuff after the : is the path to the file on the remote machine, and the path after rsync is the path you want to copy it to - replace these with your paths

• When you change the app, stop the binary, and repeat the last step again

It's not a great solution by any means, but it works.