Getting started

bunium is an Electron-like framework: Bun drives a main process, and every window is rendered by CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) painted into a native layer — not a system WebView. Pages get real Chromium behavior, prefers-color-scheme included.

Requires Bun ≥ 1.x, on macOS, Linux, or Windows. The right native CEF binaries for your platform install automatically as part of bunium — nothing to build yourself.

Quickstart

bunx --bun create-bunium-app my-app --template=solid-ts
cd my-app
bun install
bun dev

Templates: react-ts, react-js, solid-ts, solid-js, vue-ts, vue-js — all Vite-based.

Install into an existing project

bun add bunium

Minimal app

import { app, BuniumWindow } from "bunium";

const win = new BuniumWindow({
  url: "https://example.com",
  width: 1024,
  height: 700,
  title: "Hello",
});

win.onClose(() => {
  console.log("window closed");
  app.shutdown();
});

new BuniumWindow(...) starts the app automatically. One bunium app per process — don't try to run two.

Dev vs prod

Dev: loadURL(http://localhost:5173/) against a running Vite dev server. HMR works for free — a bunium window is a real Chromium tab.

Prod: point at built static output, then load over the custom bunium:// scheme:

import { app, BuniumWindow } from "bunium";

app.setAppRoot(`${import.meta.dir}/../dist`);
const win = new BuniumWindow({ url: "bunium://app/" });

bunium://app/<path> resolves against the app root with real MIME types, relative <script src>/fetch()/<link> support, and clean 404s. Call setAppRoot once, before any window loadURL()s a bunium:// URL.

The scaffold template

Scaffolded apps get a bunium/main.{ts,js} with exactly that dev/prod branch (keyed on NODE_ENV), scripts for dev (concurrently), build (tsc -b && vite build), and start. See the template's own README comments for details.

Shipping your app

See Packaging for producing a distributable .app/.exe/ .deb/AppImage, and Auto-update for shipping updates to it.

Related: Window, Typed IPC, <bunium-webview>, System features.