Is it supported to make rust crate at root and npm project at child directory?

[anatawa12]

I'm going to develop an gui app with tauri and I already have some cli version in rust so I want to make directory structure like the following:

  - repository root (cargo workspace)
     +- common library (rust)
     +- cli version (rust)
     `- gui rust code (rust)
         `- gui web code (npm)

However, in the tauri documentation, there is no documentation for such a use case.
(In Integrate into Existing Project, integrating to existing web app is described but integrating to existing rust project is not.)

Of course, I can make like following and add the rust project to the repository root but I don't like this structure.

  - repository root (cargo workspace)
     +- common library (rust)
     +- cli version (rust)
     `- gui web code (npm)
         `- gui rust code (rust)

[FabianLars]

Yes it is, though it may requires to use cargo tauri (via cargo install tauri-cli) instead of the npm based cli, unless you're okay with also having a package.json file at the repo root.

cargo tauri will actively search for the tauri config file in the current working dir (including subfolders) so the exact repo structure doesn't really matter as long as you configure beforeDev|BuildCommand and devPath/distDir accordingly.

[RenaudDenis]

I much prefer this directory structure too.

However, after I install the tauri cli and move the files accordingly, cargo tauri dev seems to expect my package.json to be in the parent directory of my project instead of the web\ subdirectory.

So, if my project structure is as follows:

/sandbox/my-project — The base directory of my project and where my cargo.toml is
/sandbox/my-project/web — The web part of my project, containing the package.json

When I run cargo tauri dev in the base directory, it's looking for the package.json in /sandbox instead of /sandbox/my-project/web.

Here is a part of my tauri.conf.json:

  "build": {
    "beforeDevCommand": "npm run dev",
    "beforeBuildCommand": "npm run build",
    "devPath": "http://localhost:1420",
    "distDir": "dist/"
  },

Do you see what I am doing wrong?

[FabianLars]

you can specify the cwd for beforeDev|BuildCommand yourself. Something like this

"beforeDevCommand": {
  "script": "npm run dev",
  "cwd": "web/",

[RenaudDenis]

Great! It works, many thanks