e4x / pywebview

A lightweight cross-platform native wrapper around a webview component that allows to display HTML content in its own dedicated window

pywebview

pywebview is a lightweight cross-platform wrapper around a webview component that allows to display HTML content in its own native GUI window. It gives you power of web technologies in your desktop application, eliminating the need of launching a web browser. Combined with a lightweight web framework like Flask, Bottle or web.py, you can create beautiful cross-platform HTML5 user interfaces targeting WebKit, while hiding implementation details from the end user. If HTML is not your strong point, you might want to use REMI, which allows you to create HTML based interfaces using Python code only.

pywebview is lightweight and has no dependencies on an external GUI framework. It uses native GUI for creating a web component window: WinForms on Windows, Cocoa on Mac OSX and Qt4/5 or GTK3 on Linux. If you choose to freeze your application, it does not bundle a heavy GUI toolkit with it keeping the executable size small. Compatible with both Python 2 and 3. While Android is not supported, you can use the same codebase with solutions like Python for Android for creating an APK.

License

The BSD license

Gallery

Apps created with pywebview. If you have built an app using pywebview, please do not hesitate to showcase it.

• Next for Traktor: http://flowrl.com/next
• Traktor Librarian: http://flowrl.com/librarian/

Installation

If you have the dependencies installed, simply:

pip install pywebview

To automatically fetch and install Python dependencies for your platform, install with the appropriate "install extras".

(Note that the same code is installed regardless; if more than one of the libraries below are available they will be tried in the order listed in this readme.)

On Windows (using WinForms with pythonnet):

pip install pywebview[winforms]

On Mac (using the Cocoa WebKit widget via pyobjc):

pip install pywebview[cocoa]

On Linux (using GTK3 via PyGObject):

pip install pywebview[gtk3]

On Linux or Mac with either Qt 5:

pip install pywebview[qt5]  # Qt5 with PyQt5

To use pywebview with PyQt4, you have to install it separately, as it is not available in pypi.

A second implementation for Windows using pywin32 and comtypes is also available:

pip install pywebview[win32]

Dependencies

Windows

On Windows you can choose between Win32 and Windows Forms implementation. The Win32 implementation is not actively developed and misses some features.

For Windows Forms pythonnet

For Win32 you need pywin32, comtypes. ActiveState distribution of Python 2 comes with pywin32 preinstalled

OS X

pyobjc. PyObjC comes presintalled with the Python bundled in OS X. For a stand-alone Python installation you have to install it separately.

Linux

For GTK3 based systems:PyGObject On Debian based systems run sudo apt-get install python-gi gir1.2-webkit-3.0

For QT based systems

Either PyQt4 or PyQt5

Usage

import webview

webview.create_window("It works, Jim!", "http://www.flowrl.com")

For more elaborated usage, refer to the examples in the examples directory. There is also a sample Flask application boilerplate provided in the examples/flask_app directory. It provides an application scaffold and boilerplate code for a real-world application.

API

• webview.create_window(title, url='', width=800, height=600, resizable=True, fullscreen=False, min_size=(200, 100)), strings={}, confirm_quit=False, background_color='#FFF') Create a new WebView window. Calling this function will block application execution, so you have to execute your program logic in a separate thread. title - Window title url - URL to load width - Window width. Default is 800px. height - Window height. Default is 600px. resizable - Whether window can be resized. Default is True fullscreen - Whether to start in fullscreen mode. Default is False min_size - a (width, height) tuple that specifies a minimum window size. Default is 200x100 strings - a dictionary with localized strings confirm_quit - Whether to display a quit confirmation dialog. Default is False background_color - Background color of the window displayed before webview is loaded. Specified as a hex color. Default is white. strings - a dictionary with localized strings. Default strings and their keys are defined in localization.py

These functions below must be invoked after webview windows is created with create_window(). Otherwise an exception is thrown.

• webview.load_url(url) Load a new URL in the previously created WebView window.

• webview.load_html(content) Loads HTML content in the WebView window

• webview.get_current_url() Return a current URL

• webview.toggle_fullscreen() Toggle a fullscreen mode on the active monitor

• webview.create_file_dialog(dialog_type=OPEN_DIALOG, directory='', allow_multiple=False, save_filename='') Create an open file (webview.OPEN_DIALOG), open folder (webview.FOLDER_DIALOG) or save file (webview.SAVE_DIALOG) dialog. allow_multiple=True enables multiple selection. directory Initial directory. save_filename Default filename for save file dialog. Return a tuple of selected files, None if cancelled

• webview.destroy_window() Destroy the webview window

Testing

pywebview uses pytest for testing. To run tests, simply type pytest tests in the project root directory. Tests cover only trivial mistakes, syntax errors, exceptions and such, in other words there is no functional testing. Each test verifies that a pywebview window can be opened and exited without errors when run under different scenarios.

What web renderer is used?

For OS X and Linux systems you get WebKit. The actual version depends on the version of installed Safari on OS X and QT / GTK on Linux.

For Windows, you get MSHTML (Trident) in all its glory. The version depends on the installed version of Internet Explorer. For Windows XP systems, you cannot get anything better than IE8. For Vista, you are limited to IE9. For Windows 7/8/10, you will get the latest installed version. Embedding EdgeHTML engine is not made possible by Microsoft.

How do I freeze my application?

Use py2app on OS X and pyinstaller on Windows. For reference setup.py files, look in examples/py2app_setup.py. Pyinstaller builds a working executable out of the box, however you need to include .NET assembly Python.Runtime.dll (of pythonnet) to the target directory by providing built-in pyinstaller hook. The proper way to use this clr hook is to specify --hidden-import=clr from command-line or hiddenimports=['clr'] in spec file. This should take care of finding Python.Runtime.DLL hidden import for Windows.

VirtualEnv issues

Under virtualenv on OS X, a window created with pywebview has issues with keyboard focus and Cmd+Tab. This behaviour is caused by the Python interpretor that comes with virtualenv. To solve this issue, you need to overwrite your_venv/bin/python with the Python interpretor found on your system. Alternatively you can configure your virtual environment to use another Python interpretor as described here.