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. You can find the list of preferences in the Servo API documentation. 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

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