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Configuration

Desktop and mobile app

A Récit site becomes a native application with one app: section and one command, recit app build. The application embeds the site exactly as recit-site build produced it (dist/) in a shared Tauri 2 shell, and serves it offline. Nothing is added to the site: the pages do not know they run in a window.

Install

Bash
pnpm add -D @recit/app

@recit/app carries the shell and @tauri-apps/cli; recit loads it on demand, as it loads @recit/motion-render for recit render. Without it, recit app stops with "install @recit/app". The CLI comes from @recit/cli, as usual.

The app: section

A Récit section of recit.config, next to publish. Only identifier has no safe default when the site has no canonicalUrlOrigin.

recit.config.ts
import "@recit/site-stories/styles.css";
import { defineConfig } from "recit/config";

export default defineConfig({
  // Site options
  site: { title: "Lorem Ipsum Docs" },
  canonicalUrlOrigin: "https://docs.example.com",
  navigation: [{ type: "doc", file: "index" }],
  // Récit sections
  publish: { dir: "./stories", routePrefix: "/stories" },
  app: {
    productName: "Lorem Ipsum Docs",
    identifier: "com.example.loremipsum",
    window: { width: 1280, height: 800, minWidth: 720 },
  },
});

Names

The window shows productName exactly as written. The files on disk follow two rules of the systems:

• the Linux packages (.deb, .rpm) are named after the ASCII form of productName, because Debian and RPM refuse a package name outside ASCII: Récit Docs gives recit-docs, and the diagnostic app-product-name-ascii says so. A name with nothing left in ASCII takes the name below;
• the binary is named after the identifier without its first segment, in lowercase with hyphens (mainBinaryName of Tauri): com.example.loremipsum gives example-loremipsum, so two applications installed on the same machine never share /usr/bin/recit-app.

Diagnostics

recit app resolves the section before anything else and prints the problems like recit build. An error stops the build; a warning does not.

Commands

dir defaults to the current folder. Everything generated lives in <site>/.recit/app/: the shell, its tauri.conf.json (generated at every call, never edited by hand), the icons, the Cargo target/ and, after a build, the installers in bundle/. The folder is ignored by git. RECIT_APP_TARGET_DIR moves the Cargo cache out of the site, to share it between the sites of a monorepo: the second site does not compile Tauri again, and its installers are still copied to its own .recit/app/bundle/ (Tauri writes them under the shared target directory, where the next build of another site overwrites them).

A site of a pnpm workspace adds the command to its package.json:

package.json
{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "recit-site build",
    "app:build": "recit app build"
  }
}

Prerequisites (desktop)

Rust stable, installed at user level with rustup, and the libraries of the system's webview:

• Linux (Debian, Ubuntu): sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev libssl-dev libxdo-dev pkg-config file curl wget. A machine without a display links the application all the same; to start it there (a smoke test), add xvfb, xauth and dbus, and run it under xvfb-run -a dbus-run-session -- <binary>: without a session bus, GTK waits 25 seconds before the window appears.
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
• Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ workload; WebView2 is part of Windows 10 and 11.

The first build compiles the shell and its dependencies, a few minutes; the next ones reuse the Cargo cache.

What works offline

The bundle of recit-site build has everything the site needs, so the application does too:

• the pages, one HTML file per route, and the client router after the first one;
• the Pagefind search, index and WebAssembly included;
• the fonts, the code highlighting, the math and the diagrams, all in the bundle;
• the stories the site publishes: decks and films play in the window.

A reload on a deep page finds its HTML file; an unknown address falls back on index.html, so the site's 404 page shows. recit app preview reproduces that resolution in the browser, to check a site before installing Rust.

Sizes

Measured on the example site examples/site-embed (a few pages, one deck, Pagefind), built on Linux x86_64 with Tauri 2.12:

A site grows these numbers by the size of its dist/: pages, images, fonts and the search index.

Limits

• basePath and cdnUrl are refused (see the diagnostics): the application serves the site at its root, from its own files.
• No server in the application: no SSR, no API. A site built with --experimental-ssr is a hosting matter.
• Links to other origins open in the system browser, the window stays on the site. To load another origin inside the window, list it in allowedOrigins.
• The smartphone remote of a deck needs the development server: there is none in the application. The presenter console opens in a second window.
• recit render (MP4) stays a Node and Chromium pipeline, outside the application.

Updates

On desktop, updates are opt-in: the updater section names the endpoints that serve latest.json and the public key that signs the binaries (tauri signer generate; the private key stays a secret of the release workflow). Without the section, the shell ships without the updater. On Android and iOS, the stores update the application; updater is ignored there.