cakeui

Desktop apps with Python and a web frontend, no Rust or bundler required.

This is the runtime package. It wraps pywebview, validates arguments with Pydantic, and ships the JavaScript bridge your frontend imports. For scaffolding, the dev server and Nuitka packaging, install cakeui-cli instead.

Install

pip install cakeui          # runtime only
pip install cakeui-cli      # the `cakeui` command, which needs this runtime

Hello world

from cakeui import App

app = App(title="Notes")


@app.command
def save_note(text: str) -> dict[str, str]:
    return {"saved": text}


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

const { saved } = await cakeui.invoke("save_note", { text: "buy cake" });

save_note is checked against its annotations before the body runs, so a bad call from JavaScript is rejected with structured data instead of a string in console.log.

What is in the box

The bridge files are built from the js/ directory in the repository and committed here, so the frontend you import and the runtime that answers it can never disagree about the protocol. There is no separate npm package to install: cakeui new writes cakeui.js and cakeui.d.ts into your project, every cakeui dev refreshes them, and cakeui sync redoes the whole generated directory on demand (for example right after upgrading).

Documentation

Full documentation, the CLI reference and the packaging guide live in the repository.

License

Apache-2.0.