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Getting Started

Welcome to the guide for PYUI. This and following pages will take you through:

  • Installation
  • Starting off with a boilerplate project
  • Project Structure explanation
  • PYUI Build Tools
  • PYUI XML rules and Tags
  • PYUI API reference
  • Advance features (Python Hooks, Data streaming)
  • Adding custom tags and using syscall for binding
  • Customizing build pipeline
  • Much more

Architecture Philosophy

This framework uses the elegance of webview (provided by Pywebview) and using strict xml layout for designing pages and python code for logic. This framework compiles the layouts into 2 parts:

  • BIN file (This contains a compiled tree used for optimised object acess)
  • .html your strict xml gets compiled to pure safe html to be displayed

By doing this one can produce elegant looking apps with size very less compared to huge frameworks like PYQT yet maintain the modern layouts as it supports css and frameworks like tailwind or bootstrap and more via configuring project properly. We will touch internals of framework later and in debugging section more.

Installation

Installing PYUI (Windows)

1.Get the PYUI using 

pip install pyui-desktop

Installing PYUI (Linux)

Because this framework uses pywebview to render native GUI windows, it requires system-level GTK and WebKit libraries.

Follow these steps to set up the system dependencies and install the framework cleanly without running into externally-managed-environment errors.

Step 1: Install System GUI Dependencies

Open your terminal and run the command corresponding to your Linux distribution:

Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint / Pop!_OS

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-webkit2-4.1

(Note: If you are on an older version like Ubuntu 20.04, change gir1.2-webkit2-4.1 to gir1.2-webkit2-4.0)

Fedora / Red Hat

sudo dnf install python3-gobject gtk3 webkit2gtk4.1

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S python-gobject gtk3 webkit2gtk-4.1

Step 2: Set Up Your Virtual Environment

To keep your system clean, you must use a virtual environment.

CRITICAL: You must pass the --system-site-packages flag so that Python can access the system GTK/WebKit graphics libraries you installed in Step 1. Without this flag, the installation will attempt to compile these libraries from source and fail.

# 1. Create the environment with system package access
python3 -m venv .venv --system-site-packages

# 2. Activate the virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate

Step 3: Install the Framework

Now that your environment is active and connected to your system's graphics engine, you can safely install the package:

pip install pyui-desktop

Starting off with a boilerplate project

mkdir HelloWorldApp
python -m PYUI.create HelloWorldApp

Thats it, go to the directory you mentioned 

cd HelloWorldApp

Now Compile for first time

python -m PYUI.buildtools --compileexe ./  --target DEBUG --name HelloWorldApp

Go to the DEBUG directory made and execute

HelloWorldApp.exe

Note: Replace 'HelloWorldApp' with the name of your project.

Result: enter image description here