Rust, Relm4, GTK & Nix Template

This is a starter pack for Nix friendly GTK application with Relm4 via Rust ecosystem provided to you by Bleur Stack developers.

What does it contains?

• A simple window with a headerbar
• Bunch of useful files that you SHOULD ship with your application on Linux:
  • Metainfo: describe your application for the different application stores out there;
  • Desktop: the application launcher;
  • Icons: This repo contains three icons, a normal, a nightly & monochromatic icon (symbolic) per the GNOME HIG, exported using App Icon Preview.
• Flatpak Manifest for nightly builds
• Dual installation support
• Uses Meson for building the application
• Bundles the UI files & the CSS using gresources
• A pre-commit hook to run rustfmt on your code
• Tests to validate your Metainfo, Schemas & Desktop files
• Gsettings to store the window state, more settings could be added
• Gitlab CI to produce flatpak nightlies
• i18n support

How to init a project ?

Remove python bootstrap in favor of cli bleur tool.

The template ships a simple python script to init a project easily. It asks you a few questions and replaces & renames all the necessary files.

If you clone this repository, you can run it with:

➜ python create-project.py
Welcome to GTK Rust Template
Name: Contrast
Project Name: contrast
Application ID (e.g. org.domain.MyAwesomeApp, see: https://developer.gnome.org/ChooseApplicationID/): org.gnome.design.Contrast
Author: Bleur Developers
Email: [email protected]

A new directory named contrast containing the generated project

Building the project

There are basically 2 ways of building this project.

Nix

All you need is nix package manager and the rest is already done for you:

# Delete result and target folder then run
cargo metadata

# Build in nix environment
nix build

# Executable binary is available at:
./result/bin/app-name

Flatpak

Make sure you have flatpak and flatpak-builder installed. Then run the commands below. Replace <application_id> with the value you entered during project creation. Please note that these commands are just for demonstration purposes. Normally this would be handled by your IDE, such as GNOME Builder or VS Code with the Flatpak extension.

flatpak install --user org.gnome.Sdk//46 org.gnome.Platform//46  org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//23.08 org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm16//23.08
flatpak-builder --user flatpak_app build-aux/<application_id>.Devel.json

Running the project

The same goes for running the project.

Nix

If you've ran the nix build command, you already have pre-compiled binary available to run at:

# Executable binary is available at:
./result/bin/app-name

Also, you can directly run nix run without having to run build command first which will instantly open the application for you:

# Nix will automatically open executable
nix run

Flatpak

Once the project is build, run the command below. Replace <application_id> and <project_name> with the values you entered during project creation. Please note that these commands are just for demonstration purposes. Normally this would be handled by your IDE, such as GNOME Builder or VS Code with the Flatpak extension.

flatpak-builder --run flatpak_app build-aux/<application_id>.Devel.json <project_name>

Translations with Gettext

The template uses gettext as a framework for translations using gettext-rs. The basic files for this can be found in the po folder. While meson will take care of building the translations the extraction and translation itself has to be done manually.

Extracting translatable strings

First of all you have to have gettext installed on your system. With that you then are able to use xgettext as following to extract the translatable strings:

xgettext --package-name=<project_name> --package-version=main --msgid-bugs-address=https://github.com/<project_name>/<project_name>/issues --files-from=po/POTFILES.in --output=po/<project_name>.pot

Note that you might need to update the po/POTFILES.in file to reflect the files of your process. This describes where xgettext is going to search for strings to translate.

Translating the translatable strings

To translate the strings you need to use po files. Tools like Poedit allow you to generate these from the po/<project_name>.pot file. It also allows you to sync the po/<project_name>.pot when you rerun xgettext.

When adding a po file also make sure to add the language code to po/LINGUAS.

FAQ

Why not use default.nix for devShell?

There's been cases when I wanted to reproduce totally different behaviors in development environment and production build. This occurs quite a lot lately for some reason and because of that, I tend to keep both shell.nix and default.nix to don't mix things up.