CI/CD for a Tauri App with GitHub Actions

Cross-compile and bundle your Tauri desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Tauri pairs a web frontend with a Rust backend to produce small native desktop installers. Because installers are OS-specific, the build runs on a matrix of operating systems. This recipe builds and publishes per-platform artifacts.

What the pipeline does

• run on a macOS, Windows, and Linux matrix
• install system deps on Linux
• install Rust and Node
• build the frontend and bundle with tauri-action
• attach installers to a release

The workflow

tauri-apps/tauri-action builds the app and uploads the per-OS bundles. Linux needs webkit2gtk and related libraries installed first.

name: Release
on:
  push:
    tags: ['v*']
jobs:
  build:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [macos-latest, ubuntu-latest, windows-latest]
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - if: runner.os == 'Linux'
        run: |
          sudo apt-get update
          sudo apt-get install -y libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev librsvg2-dev
      - uses: dtolnay/rust-toolchain@stable
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20
          cache: npm
      - run: npm ci
      - uses: tauri-apps/tauri-action@v0
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          tagName: ${{ github.ref_name }}
          releaseName: 'App ${{ github.ref_name }}'

Caching and speed

Cache the Cargo registry and target directory with Swatinem/rust-cache, plus cache: npm for the frontend. Rust release builds are CPU-heavy and run three times across the matrix, so faster, cheaper managed runners such as Latchkey (around 69% cheaper than GitHub-hosted) noticeably cut total release time and auto-retry transient toolchain fetches.

Deploying

tauri-action attaches .dmg, .msi, .deb, and .AppImage bundles to a GitHub Release. For auto-updates, sign the bundles and publish the updater JSON Tauri expects. Code signing requires platform certificates supplied as secrets.

Key takeaways

• Build on an OS matrix so each platform gets a native installer.
• Install webkit2gtk and GTK dev libs on Linux.
• Cache Cargo and node_modules to tame slow Rust builds.

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