Build and Deployment

Building, bundling, and deploying Tauri apps for macOS

Build and Deployment

Building a Tauri app for production involves more steps and more gotchas than most frameworks. This section covers the full deployment pipeline, from cargo tauri build to installing the .app bundle on a target machine.

The Build Pipeline

1. Frontend Build — Tauri runs beforeBuildCommand (e.g., vite build) to produce static assets
2. Rust Compilation — Cargo compiles the Rust backend in release mode
3. Asset Embedding — tauri::generate_context!() embeds the frontendDist contents into the binary
4. Bundle Creation — Tauri packages everything into a .app bundle (and optionally .dmg)

Topics in This Section

• Building App Bundles — The cargo tauri build command, bundle targets, icons, and installation
• macOS Pitfalls — Critical .app replacement issues that will waste hours of your time
• Cargo Cache Invalidation — Forcing Cargo to re-embed frontend assets when it doesn’t detect changes
• Bundling Node.js — Download script for including a standalone Node.js binary in your app

Quick Reference

# Build for production
cargo tauri build

# Build with a specific config
cargo tauri build --config tauri.conf.myapp.json

# The output .app bundle is at:
# target/release/bundle/macos/YourApp.app

# Install to /Applications
rm -rf /Applications/YourApp.app
cp -r target/release/bundle/macos/YourApp.app /Applications/