Is tauri right for my self hosted server and multiple client project?

[ReenigneArcher]

I am in the early stages of creating a self hosted media server (Plex/Jellyfin/Emby like) application that will have multiple clients (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and maybe more).

I don't have anything done for clients yet, but thinking of a monorepo project structure kind of like this.

I'm interested in using Tauri for the following reasons:

• tray icon
• sidecar
• notifications plugin
• autostart plugin
• packaging/distribution (this is extremely valuable as it is very time consuming to do all of this manually)
• and probably many more things I haven't discovered yet

I believe Tauri is probably perfect for the clients (except Xbox), but I am not sure about the "server". The server will be a rest API with a web UI as you would find in most self hosted services. Currently I'm using rocket (with diesel and sqlite) and I believe I would like to keep it that way for the rest API and serving up the browser front-end. Perhaps Tauri can still be used for the server, and select "Vanilla" rust as the front-end (which would go unused)?

I think it would be nice to use Tauri for as many of these crates/packages as possible to keep things standardized.

So I guess in summary my questions are:

1. Is Tauri right for the server component of my project even if I don't use the front-end features of Tauri?
2. Is Tauri right for my clients (except Xbox)? And, should each of these be their own crate, or should I be able to have a single crate for all the Tauri based clients?

[FabianLars]

Is Tauri right for the server component of my project even if I don't use the front-end features of Tauri?

Assuming frontend features includes being able to show a window (even if that shows a remote-ish url) then i think it's not the best tool for the job. It would still work though.
Not sure which features you listed are desired for the server but for example most plugins main purpose is to expose rust code/crates to the js side / integrate them better into tauri's event loop. Packaging for example can also be done via cargo-packager which is a generalized outsourced tauri-bundler.

Is Tauri right for my clients (except Xbox)?

Sure, why not.

And, should each of these be their own crate, or should I be able to have a single crate for all the Tauri based clients?

To a degree this is personal preference and/or depends on how much platform dependent stuff you'll do. In general though a single tauri project can target multiple platforms and is what people usually do.

[ReenigneArcher]

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it!

Assuming frontend features includes being able to show a window (even if that shows a remote-ish url)

The frontend of the "server" will just be a website that can be accessed from https://localhost:port on the server itself or on the lan/wan assuming the user allows that and configures their network. No GUI will be provided and they will need to use whatever browser they normally use.

Not sure which features you listed are desired for the server but for example most plugins main purpose is to expose rust code/crates to the js side / integrate them better into tauri's event loop.

Probably all of them.

• tray icon for quickly opening the web ui, adjusting settings, getting to the API docs, etc. (obviously only when the server is running with a desktop environment available)... I did already implement this in the server code using https://github.com/tauri-apps/tao and https://github.com/tauri-apps/tray-icon directly, but figured it might be nicer to actually make the whole thing use Tauri directly.
• probably sidecar for a plugin system that doesn't require rust, maybe using python
• notifications plugin to alert when certain events happen
• autostart to automatically start the server application, though I'm not yet sure if this would support running as a service

Packaging for example can also be done via cargo-packager which is a generalized outsourced tauri-bundler.

Thanks for this info! I'm pretty new to rust and still learning what to use for everything.

[FabianLars]

Being new to rust and using tao anyway you indeed may as well use tauri directly. If you later notice that you're not actually "using" it that much removing it shouldn't be too hard either.

If you get more familiar with rust and in case it's not light weight enough you could try to look into getting tray-icon running with just the platform's basic event loop without the whole windowing library winit/tao. Maybe it makes sense to wait for tauri-apps/tray-icon#253 either way x)