Expand description
🌗🚀 Dioxus
A concurrent, functional, virtual DOM for Rust
§Resources
This overview provides a brief introduction to Dioxus. For a more in-depth guide, make sure to check out:
§Overview and Goals
Dioxus makes it easy to quickly build complex user interfaces with Rust. Any Dioxus app can run in the web browser, as a desktop app, as a mobile app, or anywhere else provided you build the right renderer.
Dioxus is heavily inspired by React, supporting many of the same concepts:
- Hooks for state
- VirtualDom & diffing
- Concurrency, fibers, and asynchronous rendering
- JSX-like templating syntax
If you know React, then you know Dioxus.
Dioxus is substantially more performant than many of the other Rust UI libraries (Yew/Percy) and is significantly more performant than React—roughly competitive with InfernoJS.
Remember: Dioxus is a library for declaring interactive user interfaces—it is not a dedicated renderer. Most 1st party renderers for Dioxus currently only support web technologies.
§Brief Overview
All Dioxus apps are built by composing functions that return an Element
.
To launch an app, we use the launch
method and use features in Cargo.toml
to specify which renderer we want to use. In the launch function, we pass the app’s root Component
.
use dioxus::prelude::*;
fn main() {
launch(App);
}
// The #[component] attribute streamlines component creation.
// It's not required, but highly recommended. For example, UpperCamelCase components will not generate a warning.
#[component]
fn App() -> Element {
rsx! { "hello world!" }
}
§Elements & your first component
To assemble UI trees with Dioxus, you need to use the render
function on
something called LazyNodes
. To produce LazyNodes
, you can use the rsx!
macro or the NodeFactory API. For the most part, you want to use the rsx!
macro.
Any element in rsx!
can have attributes, listeners, and children. For
consistency, we force all attributes and listeners to be listed before
children.
let value = "123";
rsx! {
div {
class: "my-class {value}", // <--- attribute
onclick: move |_| info!("clicked!"), // <--- listener
h1 { "hello world" }, // <--- child
}
}
The rsx!
macro accepts attributes in “struct form”. Any rust expression contained within curly braces that implements IntoIterator<Item = impl IntoVNode>
will be parsed as a child. We make two exceptions: both for
loops and if
statements are parsed where their body is parsed as a child.
rsx! {
div {
for _ in 0..10 {
span { "hello world" }
}
}
}
The rsx!
macro is what generates the Element
that our components return.
#[component]
fn Example() -> Element {
rsx!{ "hello world" }
}
Putting everything together, we can write a simple component that renders a list of elements:
#[component]
fn App() -> Element {
let name = "dave";
rsx! {
h1 { "Hello, {name}!" }
div { class: "my-class", id: "my-id",
for i in 0..5 {
div { "FizzBuzz: {i}" }
}
}
}
}
§Components
We can compose these function components to build a complex app. Each new component we design must take some Properties. For components with no explicit properties we can omit the type altogether.
In Dioxus, all properties are memoized by default, and this implement both Clone and PartialEq. For props you can’t clone, simply wrap the fields in a ReadOnlySignal and Dioxus will handle the wrapping for you.
#[component]
fn App() -> Element {
rsx! {
Header {
title: "My App",
color: "red",
}
}
}
Our Header
component takes a title
and a color
property, which we
declare on an explicit HeaderProps
struct.
// The `Props` derive macro lets us add additional functionality to how props are interpreted.
#[derive(Props, PartialEq)]
struct HeaderProps {
title: String,
color: String,
}
#[component]
fn Header(props: HeaderProps) -> Element {
rsx! {
div {
background_color: "{props.color}"
h1 { "{props.title}" }
}
}
}
The #[component]
macro also allows you to derive the props
struct from function arguments:
#[component]
fn Header(title: String, color: String) -> Element {
rsx! {
div {
background_color: "{color}"
h1 { "{title}" }
}
}
}
Components that begin with an uppercase letter may be called with the traditional (for React) curly-brace syntax like so:
rsx! {
Header { title: "My App" }
}
§Hooks
While components are reusable forms of UI elements, hooks are reusable forms
of logic. Hooks provide us a way of retrieving state from Dioxus’ internal Scope
and using
it to render UI elements.
By convention, all hooks are functions that should start with use_
. We can
use hooks to define the state and modify it from within listeners.
#[component]
fn App() -> Element {
let name = use_signal(|| "world");
rsx! { "hello {name}!" }
}
Hooks are sensitive to how they are used. To use hooks, you must abide by the “rules of hooks”:
- Functions with “use_” should not be called in callbacks
- Functions with “use_” should not be called out of order
- Functions with “use_” should not be called in loops or conditionals
In a sense, hooks let us add a field of state to our component without declaring an explicit state struct. However, this means we need to “load” the struct in the right order. If that order is wrong, then the hook will pick the wrong state and panic.
Most hooks you’ll write are simply compositions of other hooks:
fn use_username(d: Uuid) -> bool {
let users = use_context::<Users>();
users.get(&id).map(|user| user.logged_in).ok_or(false)
}
To create entirely new foundational hooks, we can use the use_hook
method.
fn use_mut_string() -> String {
use_hook(|_| "Hello".to_string())
}
If you want to extend Dioxus with some new functionality, you’ll probably want to implement a new hook from scratch.
§Putting it all together
Using components, templates, and hooks, we can build a simple app.
use dioxus::prelude::*;
fn main() {
launch(App);
}
#[component]
fn App() -> Element {
let mut count = use_signal(|| 0);
rsx!(
div { "Count: {count}" }
button { onclick: move |_| count += 1, "Increment" }
button { onclick: move |_| count -= 1, "Decrement" }
)
}
§Features
This overview doesn’t cover everything. Make sure to check out the tutorial and reference guide on the official website for more details.
Beyond this overview, Dioxus supports:
- Server-side rendering
- Concurrent rendering (with async support)
- Web/Desktop/Mobile support
- Pre-rendering and rehydration
- Fragments, Portals, and Suspense
- Inline-styles
- Custom event handlers
- Custom elements
- Basic fine-grained reactivity (IE SolidJS/Svelte)
- and more!
Build cool things ✌️
Re-exports§
pub use dioxus_core;
pub use dioxus_hooks as hooks;
hooks
pub use dioxus_signals as signals;
signals
pub use dioxus_html as html;
html
pub use dioxus_core_macro as core_macro;
macro
Modules§
Functions§
- launch
launch
Launch your application without any additional configuration. SeeLaunchBuilder
for more options.