gowebwrap

A thin, config-driven desktop wrapper for any website — no Electron, no bundled Chromium, no frontend build step.

What it does

gowebwrap turns any URL into a native desktop app: a real window, its own title/icon, and a real WebKitGTK/WebView2 webview underneath — not a browser tab. Point it at a site via a gowebwrap.toml config file or CLI flags, and it launches that site as if it were a dedicated app. Everything is resolved at runtime, so the same generic binary works for any site; nothing about a given site is baked into the binary itself.

Why

Electron and Tauri (and Wails itself, used directly) all assume you're shipping a bundled frontend and are willing to build a whole app around it. If you just want an existing website to feel like a native app — its own window, its own icon, no browser chrome — that's a lot of machinery for not much:

• No bundled Chromium. Wails uses the OS's own webview (WebKitGTK on Linux, WebView2 on Windows), so binaries are megabytes, not hundreds of megabytes.
• No frontend build step. There's no frontend to build — gowebwrap just points a webview at a URL you already have.
• No forking required. One generic binary, driven by a config file or flags. Shipping your own site as a "real app" (its own name/icon/launcher) is a packaging step, not a code change.

Install / Quick start

Try it immediately (Nix, no install)

nix run github:jim-ww/gowebwrap -- --url=https://example.com

As a package in your own flake

{
  inputs.gowebwrap.url = "github:jim-ww/gowebwrap";
  # then reference inputs.gowebwrap.packages.${system}.default
}

To wrap your own site with its own name/icon, use lib.mkApp instead — see Shipping it as a real app below.

Without Nix

Grab a prebuilt binary for your platform from the Releases page.

Configuration

gowebwrap is driven entirely by a gowebwrap.toml file, CLI flags, or both — flags always win over the config file.

# gowebwrap.toml
name = "My Site"
description = "My site, as an app"
url = "https://example.com"
window-width = 1200
window-height = 800

gowebwrap --url=https://example.com --window-width=1200

If --config isn't given, gowebwrap looks for ./gowebwrap.toml in the current directory. Run gowebwrap --help for the full list of flags (window geometry, background color, dark theme, GPU acceleration, User-Agent override, etc.) — every flag has a matching config key of the same name.

Shipping it as a real app

A generic gowebwrap process running your config already works, but you can also give it its own launcher — its own name, icon, and entry in your app menu — instead of running it from a terminal.

Nix

{
  inputs.gowebwrap.url = "github:jim-ww/gowebwrap";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, gowebwrap, ... }: let
    system = "x86_64-linux";
  in {
    packages.${system}.default = gowebwrap.lib.${system}.mkApp {
      name = "my-site";
      config = ./gowebwrap.toml;
      icon = ./icon.png; # optional
    };
  };
}

nix build/nix run on this now gives you a my-site binary, complete with a .desktop launcher and icon — no separate gowebwrap install step needed.

Non-Nix

gowebwrap --config gowebwrap.toml install

This writes a canonical config to ~/.config/gowebwrap/<name>.toml and a .desktop launcher to ~/.local/share/applications/, so the app shows up in your normal application launcher/menu like anything else you installed.

Build from source

With Nix (recommended — handles all webview/GStreamer dependencies for you):

nix build github:jim-ww/gowebwrap
./result/bin/gowebwrap --url=https://example.com

Without Nix, on Linux, you'll need pkg-config, GTK3, and webkitgtk-4.1 dev packages installed, then:

go build -tags "desktop production gtk3" -o gowebwrap .

On Windows, no cgo/extra dependencies are needed — Wails' WebView2 backend calls it via syscalls, so it cross-compiles from Linux too:

GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build -tags "desktop production" -ldflags="-H=windowsgui" -o gowebwrap.exe .

Support the project

If gowebwrap is useful to you, consider a small donation.

Monero (XMR)

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License

gowebwrap is free software, licensed under the MIT license — see LICENSE.

The logo (.github/logo.png) is a derivative work of the Go gopher, designed by Renée French (CC BY 4.0), using the color palette from Takuya Ueda's gopher vector art (CC BY 3.0).