bunium

Electron-like desktop app framework — Bun (not Node) + CEF (not Chromium-via-Electron).

What is this

bunium is a from-scratch alternative to Electron. Instead of Node + Chromium bundled by Electron's own build, bunium runs on the Bun runtime and embeds CEF (the Chromium Embedded Framework) directly, rendered into a native layer — not a system WebView, not Electron's fork of Chromium. Every window is real Chromium.

• DOM-integrated <bunium-webview> — a real custom element, not an iframe hack, clipped/z-ordered/hit-tested as a native sublayer.
• Typed IPC — one generic transport, discriminated-union message maps checked on both sides at compile time.
• Vite dev, bunium:// prod — point loadURL at a Vite dev server for HMR; serve built output over a custom scheme in production.
• Native system surface — menu bar, tray, notifications, dialogs, each a thin typed wrapper over a flat C ABI, per platform.
• Auto-update — bsdiff patch-or-full-manifest updater that never re-downloads the CEF layer, with crash-journal self-repair.
• macOS · Linux · Windows — all three ports build, package, and pass smoke tests in CI.

Status

Window/paint, typed IPC, <bunium-webview>, Vite dev + prod scheme, native system features, packaging/codesigning, auto-update, CEF resource trim, and per-platform npm packages are all implemented and verified on macOS, Linux, and Windows. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the load-bearing technical decisions behind each one, and Publishing for the release pipeline.

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. Full walkthrough: Getting started.

import { app, BuniumWindow } from "bunium";

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

win.onClose(() => app.shutdown());

Docs

Full site: erfanmola.github.io/bunium

• Getting started
• Window · Typed IPC · <bunium-webview> · System features
• Packaging · Auto-update
• API reference

Contributing

This is an active solo project; issues and PRs are welcome but expect the API surface to keep moving pre-1.0. See ARCHITECTURE.md before touching native code — several approaches were deliberately tried and rejected there. Building bunium's own native layer (not needed to just use bunium): Windows build guide, Dev from macOS, Publishing.

License

MIT