Hello World

The aim of this tutorial is to get you up and running with the most basic application using Wails. You will be able to:

• Create a new Wails application
• Build the application
• Run the application

note

This tutorial uses Windows as the target platform. Output will vary slightly depending on your operating system.

Create a new Wails application

To create a new Wails application using the default vanilla JS template, you need to run the following command:

wails init -n helloworld

You should see something similar to the following:

Wails CLI v2.0.0

Initialising Project 'helloworld'
---------------------------------

Project Name:      helloworld
Project Directory: C:\Users\leaan\tutorial\helloworld
Project Template:  vanilla
Template Support:  https://wails.io

Initialised project 'helloworld' in 232ms.

This will create a new directory called helloworld in the current directory. In this directory, you will find a number of files:

build/       - Contains the build files + compiled application
frontend/    - Contains the frontend files
app.go       - Contains the application code
main.go      - The main program with the application configuration
wails.json   - The project configuration file
go.mod       - The go module file
go.sum       - The go module checksum file

Build the application

To build the application, change to the new helloworld project directory and run the following command:

wails build

You should see something like the following:

Wails CLI v2.0.0

App Type:               desktop
Platforms:              windows/amd64
Compiler:               C:\Users\leaan\go\go1.18.3\bin\go.exe
Build Mode:             Production
Devtools:               false
Skip Frontend:          false
Compress:               false
Package:                true
Clean Build Dir:        false
LDFlags:                ""
Tags:                   []
Race Detector:          false

Building target: windows/amd64
------------------------------
  - Installing frontend dependencies: Done.
  - Compiling frontend: Done.
  - Generating bundle assets: Done.
  - Compiling application: Done.
Built 'C:\Users\leaan\tutorial\helloworld\build\bin\helloworld.exe' in 10.616s.

This has compiled the application and saved it in the build/bin directory.

Run the application

If we view the build/bin directory in Windows Explorer, we should see our project binary:

We can run it by simply double-clicking the helloworld.exe file.

On Mac, Wails generates a helloworld.app file which can be run by double-clicking it.

On Linux, you can run the application using ./helloworld from the build/bin directory.

You should see the application working as expected: