Overview: Embedding Servo

Servo is a web browser engine, which we intend to be easy to embed in other applications. Currently, the documentation on how to embed Servo is sparse, and this Chapter is an active work in progress. Please feel free to reach out to us on the Servo Zulip chat if you have any questions.

Building servo without mach

It is possible to build servo directly with cargo, albeit you will likely need to reimplement some of the mach functionality. Below is a short overview of things to keep in mind.

Environment variables

./mach sets a number of environment variables to control the build, which is particularly required when cross-compiling to e.g., Android or OpenHarmony. You can run ./mach print-env to see which variables are set, and use that to configure your build.

Media support

./mach build enables the media-gstreamer feature by default, which is not the case for regular builds. media-gstreamer is required for media support on the common desktop platforms. On Linux you will need to install the required gstreamer libraries via your package manager (e.g. by running ./mach bootstrap). On macOS ./mach bootstrap will install the required gstreamer libraries by installing the latest packages from https://github.com/servo/servo-build-deps/releases/tag/macOS. On Windows you can install the gstreamer libraries from https://github.com/servo/servo-build-deps/releases/tag/msvc-deps (version 1.22.8).

Resources

Servo requires some resources, and provides default versions via the servo-default-resources crate if the baked-in-resources feature is enabled. This is achieved by baking the resources into the binary. Embedders can opt-out, by disabling default-features, and providing their own resource reading mechanism via servo_embedder_traits::submit_resource_reader. In such a case the ResourceReader implementation is responsible for providing all resources.

An example usage is the OpenHarmony port, which reads all resources from the filesystem: ohos/resources.rs.