Manual Builds

The Wails CLI does a lot of heavy lifting for the project, but sometimes it's desirable to manually build your project. This document will discuss the different operations the CLI does and how this may be achieved in different ways.

Build Process

When either wails build or wails dev are used, the Wails CLI performs a common build process:

- Install frontend dependencies
- Build frontend project
- Generate build assets
- Compile application
- [optional] Compress application

Install frontend dependencies

CLI Steps

• If the -s flag is given, this step is skipped
• Checks wails.json to see if there is an install command in the key frontend:install
• If there isn't, it skips this step
• If there is, it checks if package.json exists in the frontend directory. If it doesn't exist, it skips this step
• An MD5 sum is generated from the package.json file contents
• It checks for the existence of package.json.md5 and if it exists, will compare the contents of it (an MD5 sum) with the one generated to see if the contents have changed. If they are the same, this step is skipped
• If package.json.md5 does not exist, it creates it using the generated MD5 sum
• If a build is now required, or node_modules does not exist, or the -f flag is given, the install command is executed in the frontend directory

Manual Steps

This step could be done from the command line or a script with npm install.

Build frontend project

Wails CLI

• If the -s flag is given, this step is skipped
• Checks wails.json to see if there is a build command in the key frontend:build
• If there isn't, it skips this step
• If there is, it is executed in the frontend directory

Manual Steps

This step could be done from the command line or a script with npm run build or whatever the frontend build script is.

Generate assets

Wails CLI

• If -nopackage flag is set, this stage is skipped
• If the build/appicon.png file does not exist, a default one is created
• For Windows, see Bundling for Windows
• If build/windows/icon.ico does not exist, it will create it from the build/appicon.png image.

Windows

• If build/windows/icon.ico does not exist, it will create it from build/appicon.png using icon sizes of 256, 128, 64, 48, 32 and 16. This is done using winicon.
• If the build/windows/<projectname>.manifest file does not exist, it creates it from a default version.
• Compiles the application as a production build (above)
• Uses winres to bundle the icon and manifest into a .syso file ready for linking.

Manual Steps

• Create icon.ico using the winicon CLI tool (or any other tool).
• Create / Update a .manifest file for your application
• Use the winres CLI to generate a .syso file.

Compile application

Wails CLI

• If the -clean flag is provided, the build directory is deleted and recreated
• For wails dev, the following default Go flags are used: -tags dev -gcflags "all=-N -l"
• For wails build, the following default Go flags are used: -tags desktop,production -ldflags "-w -s"
  • On Windows, -ldflags "-w -h -H windowsgui"
• Additional tags passed to the CLI using -tags are added to the defaults
• Additional ldflags passed to the CLI using -ldflags are added to the defaults
• The -o flag is passed through
• The Go compiler specified by -compiler will be used for compilation

Manual steps

• For dev build, the minimum command would be: go build -tags dev -gcflags "all=-N -l"
• For production build, the minimum command would be: go build -tags desktop,production -ldflags "-w -s -H windowsgui"
• Ensure that you compile in the same directory as the .syso file

Compress application

Wails CLI

• If the -upx flag has been given, the upx program will be run to compress the application with the default settings
• If -upxflags is also passed, these flags are used instead of the default ones

Manual steps

• Run upx [flags] manually to compress the application.