Running servoshell

Assuming you’re in the directory containing servo, you can run servoshell with:

$ ./servo [url] [options]

Use --help to list the available command line options:

$ ./servo --help

Use --pref to configure Servo’s behaviour, including to enable experimental web platform features. For example, to run our Conway’s Game of Life demo with WebGPU enabled:

$ ./servo --pref dom.webgpu.enabled https://demo.servo.org/experiments/webgpu-game-of-life/

Use --devtools=6080 to enable support for debugging pages with Firefox devtools:

$ ./servo --devtools=6080

Note: devtools support is currently a work in progress (#32404).

Built servoshell yourself?

When you build it yourself, servoshell will be in target/debug/servo or target/release/servo. You can run it directly as shown above, but we recommend using mach instead.

To run servoshell with mach, replace ./servo with ./mach run -d -- or ./mach run -r --, depending on the build profile you want to run. For example, both of the commands below run the debug build of servoshell with the same options:

$ target/debug/servo https://demo.servo.org
$ ./mach run -d -- https://demo.servo.org

Runtime dependencies

On Linux, servoshell requires:

  • GStreamer ≥ 1.18
  • gst-plugins-base ≥ 1.18
  • gst-plugins-good ≥ 1.18
  • gst-plugins-bad ≥ 1.18
  • gst-plugins-ugly ≥ 1.18
  • libXcursor
  • libXrandr
  • libXi
  • libxkbcommon
  • vulkan-loader

Keyboard shortcuts

  • Ctrl+Q (⌘Q on macOS) exits servoshell
  • Ctrl+L (⌘L on macOS) focuses the location bar
  • Ctrl+R (⌘R on macOS) reloads the page
  • Alt+← (⌘← on macOS) goes back in history
  • Alt+→ (⌘→ on macOS) goes forward in history
  • Ctrl+= (⌘= on macOS) increases the page zoom
  • Ctrl+- (⌘- on macOS) decreases the page zoom
  • Ctrl+0 (⌘0 on macOS) resets the page zoom
  • Esc exits fullscreen mode