Pywebview

6.2 · active · verified Mon Apr 13

Pywebview is a lightweight cross-platform wrapper for webview components, allowing you to build desktop GUI applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It abstracts away platform-specific webview implementations (Edge Chromium, Cocoa WebKit, GTK, QT, WinForms, etc.) providing a consistent Python API. The current version is 6.2 and it follows an active release cadence with frequent updates and bug fixes.

Warnings

breaking Pywebview versions 6.x and higher require Python 3.8 or newer. Applications targeting older Python versions must use pywebview 5.x or earlier.
Fix: Upgrade your Python environment to 3.8+ or pin pywebview to `<6.0` (e.g., `pip install pywebview<6.0`).
gotcha Pywebview relies on native web rendering engines (e.g., WebView2 on Windows, WebKit on macOS, WebKitGTK/QtWebEngine on Linux). Missing system dependencies or an outdated browser component can lead to `webview.start()` failures, blank windows, or unexpected rendering issues.
Fix: Ensure the necessary system webview components are installed and up-to-date for your operating system. Consult the pywebview documentation's 'Installation' or 'Deployment' sections for platform-specific requirements.
gotcha The `webview.start()` function is blocking by default. Integrating pywebview with existing asynchronous code or other GUI toolkits often requires running `webview.start()` in a separate thread or using advanced non-blocking patterns.
Fix: For asynchronous integration or to run alongside other GUI loops, use `import threading; threading.Thread(target=webview.start, args=(callback, window)).start()` or refer to the documentation for using `webview.GUI()` to manage the event loop explicitly.
gotcha When bundling applications with PyInstaller, specific configurations and hooks might be necessary to ensure pywebview's bundled resources and dynamic libraries are correctly included, especially for different webview backends. Failures can manifest as blank windows, crashes, or missing assets.
Fix: Refer to the pywebview documentation's 'Deployment' section for PyInstaller-specific hooks and configuration examples (e.g., `--add-data 'webview:webview'` or similar, depending on your environment and pywebview version). Test your bundled application thoroughly.

Install

pip install pywebview Install latest version

Imports

webview
```
import webview
```
Primary module import for all core functionalities.

Quickstart

This quickstart creates a simple pywebview window, loads HTML content, exposes a Python function to JavaScript, and calls it from the browser context to update a paragraph on the page.

import webview

def hello_world(window):
    """Function to be executed after the window is ready."""

    # Expose a Python function to JavaScript
    def get_message():
        return "Hello from Python!"
    window.expose(get_message)

    # Execute JavaScript after the window is fully loaded
    # Access the exposed Python function via window.pywebview.api
    window.evaluate_js(
        "document.getElementById('message').innerText = 'Loading...';"
    )
    window.evaluate_js(
        "window.pywebview.api.get_message().then(result => {"
        "document.getElementById('message').innerText = result;" 
        "});"
    )

html_content = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Pywebview App</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Pywebview Example</h1>
    <p id="message">Waiting for Python to load...</p>
</body>
</html>
"""

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Create a webview window
    window = webview.create_window(
        'My First Pywebview App',
        html=html_content,
        width=800, 
        height=600
    )
    
    # Start the webview application. 
    # The 'hello_world' function will be called when the window is ready.
    webview.start(hello_world, window)

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