Make a standalone desktop GUI application with Go

This code shows how to make a GUI Go program that will run locally standalone.

It is essentially a self-contained web server, dedicated to serving this GUI, using an HTML5 approach, and packaged as a single stand-alone executable with no external dependencies. It's only around 100 lines of Go code.

Here's What the GUI Looks Like

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Get it, Build it, Try it out

This should bring up the GUI in your browser...

git clone [email protected]:peterhoward42/godesktopgui.git
cd godesktopgui
make

Compiling-in the Asset Files

All the code described in this section is in cmd/main.go.

The App is just a main() that starts a web server to serve the HTML at the /thegui endpoint, and then launches a browser tab pointing at the server.

The dynamic aspect of the GUI comes from the HTML being generated on-the-fly, using Go's html.Template package - executing against a GuiData structure instance.

i.e. Model/View pattern.

The HTML template is the first example of a file we want to be compiled-in. The original file lives in the source tree at resources/files/templates/maingui.html.

We should digress first into Go's http.FileSystem interface. It's very simple, with just a single method:

Open(name string) (File, error)

If you look at the parseTemplateFromVirtualFileSystem() function in main.go, you'll find code that uses this Open method on an http.FileSystem to read in the template file.:

generated.CompiledFileSystem.Open()

So it seems there's a package somewhee called generated, which is exporting an http.FileSystem attribute called CompiledFileSystem.

Generating the Source Code Required

The code that defines the generated package is auto-generated using the github.com/shurcooL/vfsgen package; which is capabable of sucking up files from a real directory tree and expressing their contents as compilable Go source files

You can see the code for the generation command in generated/cmd/generator.go.

To avoid having to run it manually to build the program, it's built in to the Makefile dependency graph with the generate target.

You'll see that the generate make target does not run the command explicitly but instead does

go generate

This is a standard Go capability. It looks for comments structured like this one in generated.cmd.generator.go

//go:generate go run generator.go

And runs the command following the go:generate part.

CSS and Javascript Files

The HTML we serve makes reference to CSS files and to Javascript files (from the Bootstrap library). For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/files/css/bootstrap.min.css">

All the files that are needed live alongside the HTML template in the resources/files directory tree mentioned above, and thus also get incorporated into the compiled-in virtual file system.

So we configure the web server to satisfy any requests for URLs in the style of /files/xxx by serving the file called xxx from the compiled-in file system:

http.Handle("/files/", http.FileServer(generated.CompiledFileSystem))

During development, when you are iterating on the HTML, it's handy to replace this with a http.FileServerthat uses the original files instead.

http.Handle("/files/", http.FileServer(http.Dir(<path>)))

Where <path> is the directory that contains `/files`.

Bootstrap

Note that we use Bootstrap 3, which comes bundled with an icon library. If you want to upgrade to Bootstrap 4 (which does not), you can easily use an external icon library like https://useiconic.com/open . Iconic has explict support for Bootstrap. You then include the font and css files it depends on, in the same way as the other files are included.