Building the Suture Desktop App

This guide covers building the Suture desktop application from source. The desktop app uses Tauri to provide a native UI that calls suture-core directly — no CLI shelling.

Prerequisites

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev libssl-dev pkg-config

macOS

xcode-select --install

Ensure Rust is installed (see rustup.rs).

Windows

1. Install Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload.
2. Install WebView2 Runtime (pre-installed on Windows 11).

Build from Source

cd desktop-app
cargo build --features tauri --release

The binary will be in target/release/.

Development Mode

For iterative development with faster builds and auto-reload:

cd desktop-app
cargo build --features tauri
cargo run --features tauri

Distribution

To produce a platform-specific installer:

cd desktop-app
cargo tauri build

Output formats:

Installers are written to target/release/bundle/.

How the UI Works

• The Tauri backend calls suture-core directly via Rust FFI — it does not shell out to the CLI.
• The frontend is standard HTML/CSS/JS at ui/index.html.
• All communication between the frontend and backend uses window.__TAURI__.invoke().

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│         Tauri WebView           │
│  ┌─────────────────────────┐   │
│  │    HTML/CSS/JS UI        │   │
│  └───────────┬─────────────┘   │
│              │ invoke()         │
│  ┌───────────▼─────────────┐   │
│  │  Rust Tauri Commands     │   │
│  └───────────┬─────────────┘   │
│              │                  │
│  ┌───────────▼─────────────┐   │
│  │    suture-core API       │   │
│  └───────────┬─────────────┘   │
│              │                  │
│  ┌───────────▼─────────────┐   │
│  │  .suture/ (SQLite + CAS)│   │
│  └─────────────────────────┘   │
└─────────────────────────────────┘