Tauri is a set of tools that lets you build cross-platform desktop apps using frontend frameworks. When combined with React and Vite, it can be used to build extremely fast binaries for all desktop platforms.
Developers can use Tauri to write secure, lean, and fast cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies. Electron has for many developers typically been the go-to framework for these apps, but Tauri is now well-positioned to compete.
In this post, we will build a simple pomodoro timer, and I invite you to follow along with this tutorial at your own pace.
- What is Tauri?
- Prerequisites
- Scaffold a Tauri app with create-tauri-app
- Building the frontend
- Triggering a notification and adding a reset timer button
- Building the app
What is Tauri?
It is “blazingly fast” (their words, not mine; but follow the link to see benchmarks and decide for yourself) because it uses Rust as its backend (vs. Node), produces smaller binaries, and is more secure than Node is.
It uses the WebView that the underlying OS provides to render the application’s UI — this is one of the reasons why the application binaries are smaller (as compared to Electron). The WRY library from the Tauri toolkit provides a unified interface to interact with WebViews provided by different operating systems. The WRY library uses the Tao crate for cross-platform window management.
Tauri brings it all together and enables developers to write powerful and performant desktop applications.
Prerequisites
Before we get started, we need to install a couple of things.
Rust
To install Rust, open your terminal and run:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
If you are on Windows, please follow these instructions.
npm
npm is a package manager for Node. It comes bundled with Node, so if you have Node installed on your system, you are likely to have npm as well.
If you don’t have Node, install it using Homebrew,
brew install node
With npm and Rust installed, we are all set to start developing apps using Tauri!
Scaffold a Tauri app with create-tauri-app
Since the prerequisites are now installed, we can start developing our pomodoro timer desktop app. The folks at Tauri have made scaffolding an app super easy with the create-tauri-app npm package.
To get started, run:
npx create-tauri-app
After running this command, you will be required to enter some information:
- The name of the project
- The title of the window in which the app will load
- The UI recipe
- Template to use
For this tutorial app, I went with the following, found below 👇
- Name of the project as
pomodoro
- Title of the window as
Pomodoro Timer App
- UI recipe as
create-vite
- Template to use
react-ts
Hitting “Enter” will then install all the necessary packages and output a scaffolded project under the folder with the same name as the project name.
We are now all set to run the project for the very first time!
To run the project, run:
cd pomodoro // cding into the project folder npm run tauri dev //running the app
This will first start the frontend server and then will download crates (if necessary) and compile the Rust backend. Once compiled without any errors, the app will start and you will be greeted with something like this:
The project folder contains a lot of important files and folders. The two that we will deal with in this tutorial are:
src
foldersrc-tauri/tauri.config.json
file
Running the app for the first time will take some time because the app needs to download and compile the necessary rust crates.
(Note: for folks using macOS for development: if you run the command to start the app and the app window appears over a full-screen app, you won’t be able to move the app window. This is a known bug and can be tracked here)
Building the frontend
We will use ChakraUI for UI components and styling. To set up ChakraUI, follow their getting started guide.
We will be building the UI below.
Below are the requirements for our app:
- Should have a “Start” and “Pause” button, which starts and stops the timer
- Once the timer hits “0”, trigger a notification to the user
- Option to choose interval lengths, i.e., 15 min., 30 min., and 60 min.
- A “Reset” button to reset the timer to the initial value
To start, head over to src/App.tsx
.
// src/App.tsx import { Button, Flex, Text } from "@chakra-ui/react"; import { useEffect, useState } from "react"; function App() { const [time, setTime] = useState(0); const [timerStart, setTimerStart] = useState(false); const buttons = [ { value: 900, display: "15 minutes", }, { value: 1800, display: "30 minutes", }, { value: 3600, display: "60 minutes", }, ]; const toggleTimer = () => { setTimerStart(!timerStart); }; useEffect(() => { const interval = setInterval(() => { if (timerStart) { if (time > 0) { setTime(time - 1); } else if (time === 0) { // TODO: Send notification to user. clearInterval(interval); } } }, 1000); return () => clearInterval(interval); }, [timerStart, time]); return ( <div className="App" style={{ height: "100%" }}> <Flex background="gray.700" height="100%" alignItems="center" flexDirection="column" > <Text color="white" fontWeight="bold" marginTop="20" fontSize="35"> Pomodoro Timer </Text> <Text fontWeight="bold" fontSize="7xl" color="white"> {`${ Math.floor(time / 60) < 10 ? `0${Math.floor(time / 60)}` : `${Math.floor(time / 60)}` }:${time % 60 < 10 ? `0${time % 60}` : time % 60}`} </Text> <Flex> <Button width="7rem" background="tomato" color="white" onClick={toggleTimer} > {!timerStart ? "Start" : "Pause"} </Button> {/* TODO: Add Button to reset timer */} </Flex> <Flex marginTop={10}> {buttons.map(({ value, display }) => ( <Button marginX={4} background="green.300" color="white" onClick={() => { setTimerStart(false); setTime(value); }} > {display} </Button> ))} </Flex> </Flex> </div> ); } export default App;
Here, we are using ChakraUI’s built-in components for setting up the layout for buttons and text. The setTimeout
in the useEffect
Hook drives the UI by setting state every passing second.
The effect reruns:
- When the user clicks on the duration buttons (this sets both the
timerStart
andtime
state values) - When the user clicks on the Start/Pause buttons (this sets the
timerStart
state value) - Every passing second (the
setTimeout
triggers an update to thetime
value, see line number 29)
To display the time in consistent format (mm:ss), we need to do some math gymnastics. It’s certainly not perfect, but it does the job.
There are two to-dos here:
- Adding a Reset button
- On clicking this, a native dialog triggers, asking the user to confirm the action
- Adding a notification trigger
- When the timer hits 0, a notification needs to be sent to the user
But, before we start working on these items, we need to add the native APIs we will be calling in the src-tauri/tauri.config.json
file. If we don’t do this step, we won’t be able to trigger the native elements.
So, head over to src-tauri/tauri.config.json
and add this to tauri.allowlist
:
"tauri": { "allowlist": { // other allowed items "notification": { "all": true }, "dialog": { "all": true } } }
(Note: for the sake of simplicity, everything is allowed for dialog
and notification
. We can be more specific to avoid unwanted access)
Triggering a notification and adding a reset timer button
// src/App.tsx import { Button, Flex, Text } from "@chakra-ui/react"; import { useEffect, useState } from "react"; + import { sendNotification } from "@tauri-apps/api/notification"; + import { ask } from "@tauri-apps/api/dialog"; function App() { const [time, setTime] = useState(0); const [timerStart, setTimerStart] = useState(false); const buttons = [ { value: 900, display: "15 minutes", }, { value: 1800, display: "30 minutes", }, { value: 3600, display: "60 minutes", }, ]; const toggleTimer = () => { setTimerStart(!timerStart); }; + const triggerResetDialog = async () => { + let shouldReset = await ask("Do you want to reset timer?", { + title: "Pomodoro Timer App", + type: "warning", + }); + if (shouldReset) { + setTime(900); + setTimerStart(false); + } + }; useEffect(() => { const interval = setInterval(() => { if (timerStart) { if (time > 0) { setTime(time - 1); } else if (time === 0) { + sendNotification({ + title: `Time's up!`, + body: `Congrats on completing a session!🎉`, + }); clearInterval(interval); } } }, 1000); return () => clearInterval(interval); }, [timerStart, time]); return ( <div className="App" style={{ height: "100%" }}> <Flex background="gray.700" height="100%" alignItems="center" flexDirection="column" > <Text color="white" fontWeight="bold" marginTop="20" fontSize="35"> Pomodoro Timer </Text> <Text fontWeight="bold" fontSize="7xl" color="white"> {`${ Math.floor(time / 60) < 10 ? `0${Math.floor(time / 60)}` : `${Math.floor(time / 60)}` }:${time % 60 < 10 ? `0${time % 60}` : time % 60}`} </Text> <Flex> <Button width="7rem" background="tomato" color="white" onClick={toggleTimer} > {!timerStart ? "Start" : "Pause"} </Button> + <Button + background="blue.300" + marginX={5} + onClick={triggerResetDialog} + > + Reset + </Button> </Flex> <Flex marginTop={10}> {buttons.map(({ value, display }) => ( <Button marginX={4} background="green.300" color="white" onClick={() => { setTimerStart(false); setTime(value); }} > {display} </Button> ))} </Flex> </Flex> </div> ); } export default App;
Tauri offers a JS/TS API package for calling functions from the Rust backend. The necessary packages are already installed by the create-tauri-app
utility, so we can directly import the npm package and use it in our frontend code.
For triggering a notification:
- Import the
sendNotification
function from the notification module - Call the function in the frontend code (see line 42). More on the API here
For triggering a dialog:
- Import the
ask
function from the dialog module - Call the function in the frontend code. The first parameter is the text that will appear in the dialog box (see line 27). More on the API here
- Since it requires user input, the function returns a promise with a boolean value, so we can
await
it to get the value the user clicked on - If the user accepts, we reset the time value to 15 min. and stop the timer if it is running already
Finally, to run the app, run npm run tauri dev
.
Building the app
Building the application for distribution can be achieved by running:
cargo tauri build
This will build the application and create a binary under src-tauri/target/release
.
Now, the app is ready to be published!
Conclusion
That’s it! Thank you for reading my walkthrough on building an app using Tauri with Vite and React. If you have any questions/suggestions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @rahulnpadalkar. You can find the GitHub repo with all the code here.
LogRocket: Full visibility into your production React apps
Debugging React applications can be difficult, especially when users experience issues that are hard to reproduce. If you’re interested in monitoring and tracking Redux state, automatically surfacing JavaScript errors, and tracking slow network requests and component load time, try LogRocket.

LogRocket combines session replay, product analytics, and error tracking – empowering software teams to create the ideal web and mobile product experience. What does that mean for you?
Instead of guessing why errors happen, or asking users for screenshots and log dumps, LogRocket lets you replay problems as if they happened in your own browser to quickly understand what went wrong.
No more noisy alerting. Smart error tracking lets you triage and categorize issues, then learns from this. Get notified of impactful user issues, not false positives. Less alerts, way more useful signal.
The LogRocket Redux middleware package adds an extra layer of visibility into your user sessions. LogRocket logs all actions and state from your Redux stores.
Modernize how you debug your React apps — start monitoring for free.