Splashscreen

In this lab we’ll be implementing a basic splashscreen functionality in a Tauri app. Doing so is quite straight forward, a splashscreen is effectively just a matter of creating a new window that displays some contents during the period your app is doing some heavy setup related tasks and then closing it when setting up is done.

Prerequisites

If you are not an advanced user it’s highly recommended that you use the options and frameworks provided here. It’s just a lab, you can delete the project when you’re done.

sh <(curl https://create.tauri.app/sh) --beta

$env:CTA_ARGS="--beta"; irm https://create.tauri.app/ps | iex

npm create tauri-app@latest -- --beta

yarn create tauri-app --beta

pnpm create tauri-app --beta

bun create tauri-app --beta

cargo install create-tauri-app
cargo create-tauri-app --beta

Project name: splashscreen-lab
Choose which language to use for your frontend: Typescript / Javascript
Choose your package manager: pnpm
Choose your UI template: Vanilla
Choose your UI flavor: Typescript
Would you like to setup the project for mobile as well? yes

Steps

Before you start developing any project it’s important to build and run the initial template, just to validate your setup is working as intended.
# Make sure you're in the right directory cd splashscreen-lab # Install dependencies pnpm install # Build and run the app pnpm tauri dev
The easiest way of adding new windows is by adding them directly to tauri.conf.json. You can also create them dynamically at startup, but for the sake of simplicity lets just register them instead. Make sure you have a window with the label main that’s being created as a hidden window and a window with the label splashscreen that’s created as being shown directly. You can leave all other options as their defaults, or tweak them based on preference.
src-tauri/tauri.conf.json
{ "windows": [ { "label": "main", "visible": false }, { "label": "splashscreen", "url": "/splashscreen" } ] }
Before you begin you’ll need to have some content to show. How you develop new pages depend on your chosen framework, most have the concept of a “router” that handles page navigation which should work just like normal in Tauri, in which case you just create a new splashscreen page. Or as we’re going to be doing here, create a new splashscreen.html file to host the contents.

What’s important here is that you can navigate to a /splashscreen URL and be shown the contents you want for your splashscreen. Try running the app again after this step!
/splashscreen.html
<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/src/styles.css" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" /> <title>Tauri App</title> </head> <body> <div class="container"> <h1>Tauri used Splash!</h1> <div class="row"> <h5>It was super effective!</h5> </div> </div> </body> </html>

Since splashscreens are generally intended to be used for the sake of hiding heavy setup related tasks, lets fake giving the app something heavy to do, some in the frontend and some in the backend.

To fake heavy setup in the frontend we’re going to be using a simple setTimeout function.

The easiest way to fake heavy operations in the backend is by using the Tokio crate, which is the Rust crate that Tauri uses in the backend to provide an asynchronous runtime. While Tauri provides the runtime there are various utilities that Tauri doesn’t re-export from it, so we’ll need to add the crate to our project in order to access them. This is a perfectly normal practice within the Rust ecosystem.

Don’t use std::thread::sleep in async functions, they run cooperatively in a concurrent environment not in parallel, meaning that if you sleep the thread instead of the Tokio task you’ll be locking all tasks scheduled to run on that thread from being executed, causing your app to freeze.

# Run this command where the `Cargo.toml` file is
cd src-tauri
# Add the Tokio crate
cargo add tokio
# Optionally go back to the top folder to keep developing
# `tauri dev` can figure out where to run automatically
cd ..

// These contents can be copy-pasted below the existing code, don't replace the entire file!!

// Utility function to implement a sleep function in TypeScript
function sleep(seconds: number): Promise<void> {
    return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, seconds * 1000));
}

// Setup function
async function setup() {
    // Fake perform some really heavy setup task
    console.log('Performing really heavy frontend setup task...')
    await sleep(3);
    console.log('Frontend setup task complete!')
    // Set the frontend task as being completed
    invoke('set_complete', {task: 'frontend'})
}

// Effectively a JavaScript main function
window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
    setup()
});

// Import functionalities we'll be using
use std::sync::Mutex;
use tauri::async_runtime::spawn;
use tauri::{AppHandle, Manager, State};
use tokio::time::{sleep, Duration};

// Create a struct we'll use to track the completion of
// setup related tasks
struct SetupState {
    frontend_task: bool,
    backend_task: bool,
}

// Our main entrypoint in a version 2 mobile compatible app
#[cfg_attr(mobile, tauri::mobile_entry_point)]
pub fn run() {
    // Don't write code before Tauri starts, write it in the
    // setup hook instead!
    tauri::Builder::default()
        // Register a `State` to be managed by Tauri
        // We need write access to it so we wrap it in a `Mutex`
        .manage(Mutex::new(SetupState {
            frontend_task: false,
            backend_task: false,
        }))
        // Add a command we can use to check
        .invoke_handler(tauri::generate_handler![greet, set_complete])
        // Use the setup hook to execute setup related tasks
        // Runs before the main loop, so no windows are yet created
        .setup(|app| {
            // Spawn setup as a non-blocking task so the windows can be
            // created and ran while it executes
            spawn(setup(app.handle().clone()));
            // The hook expects an Ok result
            Ok(())
        })
        // Run the app
        .run(tauri::generate_context!())
        .expect("error while running tauri application");
}

#[tauri::command]
fn greet(name: String) -> String {
    format!("Hello {name} from Rust!")
}

// A custom task for setting the state of a setup task
#[tauri::command]
async fn set_complete(
    app: AppHandle,
    state: State<'_, Mutex<SetupState>>,
    task: String,
) -> Result<(), ()> {
    // Lock the state without write access
    let mut state_lock = state.lock().unwrap();
    match task.as_str() {
        "frontend" => state_lock.frontend_task = true,
        "backend" => state_lock.backend_task = true,
        _ => panic!("invalid task completed!"),
    }
    // Check if both tasks are completed
    if state_lock.backend_task && state_lock.frontend_task {
        // Setup is complete, we can close the splashscreen
        // and unhide the main window!
        let splash_window = app.get_webview_window("splashscreen").unwrap();
        let main_window = app.get_webview_window("main").unwrap();
        splash_window.close().unwrap();
        main_window.show().unwrap();
    }
    Ok(())
}

// An async function that does some heavy setup task
async fn setup(app: AppHandle) -> Result<(), ()> {
    // Fake performing some heavy action for 3 seconds
    println!("Performing really heavy backend setup task...");
    sleep(Duration::from_secs(3)).await;
    println!("Backend setup task completed!");
    // Set the backend task as being completed
    // Commands can be ran as regular functions as long as you take
    // care of the input arguments yourself
    set_complete(
        app.clone(),
        app.state::<Mutex<SetupState>>(),
        "backend".to_string(),
    )
    .await?;
    Ok(())
}

Run the application

You should now see a splashscreen window pop up, both the frontend and backend will perform their respective heavy 3 second setup tasks, after which the splashscreen disappears and the main window is shown!

Discuss

Should you have a splashscreen?

In general having a splashscreen is an admittance of defeat that you couldn’t make your app load fast enough to not need one. In fact it tends to be better to just go straight to a main window that then shows some little spinner somewhere in a corner informing the user there’s still setup tasks happening in the background.

However, with that said, it can be a stylistic choice that you want to have a splashscreen, or you might have some very particular requirement that makes it impossible to start the app until some tasks are performed. It’s definitely not wrong to have a splashscreen, it just tends to not be necessary and can make users feel like the app isn’t very well optimized.