Nu-i uita

Minimalist password manager desktop app made with Golang-Wails & Svelte

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Features 🚀

• Using the Wails GUI framework: Wails is a framework that enables you to write desktop apps using Go and web technologies. This in itself allows you to immediately apply all your acquired knowledge if you come from the Web world, that's why we can consider it a lightweight and fast Electron alternative for Go. You can easily build applications with the flexibility and power of Go, combined with a rich, modern frontend. Wails supports cross-compilation for various platforms, native menus, dialogs and theming, use of various JavaScript frameworks for building the frontend, live development mode using the power of Vite, and a powerful CLI to easily create, build, and package applications, among many other features.
• Using CloverDB as a database: CloverDB is a lightweight, embedded NoSQL database, designed to be simple and easy to maintain, thanks to its small code base, which we have chosen for application data persistence. Although, perhaps, the main advantage of this DB is that it is written in pure Golang and that it has a simple and intuitive API. The fact that it is written in pure Golang (without any dependency on libraries in another language, such as C in the case of SQLite) allows you to avoid compiling with CGO enabled, which is useful when compiling for Windows. While CloverDB allows easy export/import to/from JSON files, we have chosen to export the data to a binary format that can only be read by the application itself.
• Using the SevelteJS frontend framework: Sevelte is a UI framework to let you write breathtakingly concise components that do minimal work in the browser. It is the framework mainly recommended for the creation of GUIs by the creators of Wails given its ease of use, mainly in combination with TypeScript. Although the Wails CLI installs Svelte3 by default, we have chosen to use Svelte5 here, which allows the use of either the runes feature or the legacy system.
• Using the svelte-spa-router library: although the official Svelte routing library is SvelteKit it is a bit overkill for the purposes of a desktop application that only aims to swap different views in response to user interaction. Instead we have used (see here) the popular svelte-spa-router library which is insanely simple to use, and has a minimal footprint.
• Using the svelte-i18n library: svelte-i18n helps you localize your application using the reactive tools offered by Svelte. This library simplifies translation management using JSON files that help your application easily switch between different languages. In fact, the use of the Wails framework, which uses web interfaces, greatly facilitates some common tasks in desktop applications, such as their translation. Some online tools can help you with the translation of JSON files, such as Translate i18next JSON resources/files.
• Using the sweetalert2 library: As the documentation for this library says "a beautiful, responsive, customizable and accessible (WAI-ARIA) replacement for JavaScript popups with zero dependencies". Here we basically use it to create modals/dialog boxes easily and quickly. It is up to the user to decide whether the result makes the application "look excessively similar" to a website.🤦
• Using Tailwindcss and its plugin daisyUI: to allow you to style your application easily and quickly, and they also integrate seamlessly with Svelte and Wails.

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👨‍🚀 Getting Started:

Installing the application

If you don't have Go, you can download the appropriate executable for your platform from here. Once unpacked, you can place it in the folder where your system normally stores executables (although you could place it in any directory). Then, you just need to update the system PATH with that address. For Linux, if you run the Makefile ("make user-install" to install to ~/.local/, or "make user-uninstall" to uninstall) you can easily install the application for the user or on the system ("sudo make install/uninstall").

If you already have Go installed (Go 1.20 or higher is required) and you want to modify code and/or build the binaries yourself, you will need to meet some prerequisites. You will need to consult the Wails documentation to install the dependencies required by your platform (see here). Obviously, for compiling and installing frontend dependencies you also need to have NodeJs installed which comes with the npm package manager (npm (Node 15+)).

Wails has the advantage of having a powerful CLI that makes it very easy to generate the scaffolding to start an application, to develop with hot reload, and to build and package it into a single binary, in addition to the already mentioned cross-compilation for different platforms. So it is highly recommended to install it with the command:

$ go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest

Note

While the wails init -n "myproject" -t svelte-ts command scaffolds a new project using Svelte3, we've already mentioned that this application uses Svelte5. If you're interested in that option, as long as you have the Wails CLI and NPM installed, you can scaffold your projects using this bash script I've created to automate that migration.

From this point on, if you have met the above requirements, you can clone the repository and run the following command in the project folder to start the application in development mode:

$ wails dev

This allows hot reloading by saving modified code and monitoring the results, both in the launched application and in a browser (at the address http://localhost:34115). Right-clicking on the opened application window allows you to choose between several options, including opening a development tools panel equivalent to the devtools of the Chrome browser.

Finally, if you want to build the application executable by packaging everything, including the application icon and all assets (fonts, images, etc.) just run the command:

$ wails build

This will build the binary into the build/bin folder. However, for choosing other build options or performing cross-compiling, you may want to take a look at the Wails CLI documentation.

Note

As mentioned above I have created for the Linux version a compressed .tar.xz file with the application and a Makefile that acts as an 'installer' that installs the executable, a desktop entry to create an entry in the Start Menu and the corresponding application icon. For the Windows version, the binary is simply compressed as a .zip inside a folder called dist/. If you prefer, you can generate both compressed files by running the project's Makefile: "make create-bundles"

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Happy coding 😀!!