Web bundles

google/webbundle is a project which aims to provide a high-performace library and various tools for handling Web bundles format.

This is not an officially supported Google product.

Specification

• Web Bundles (IETF draft)
• Subresource Loading (Explainer):

Crates

There are several crates in the repository.

webbundle

The core library. See the documentation.

webbundle-cli

The command line tool for packaging resources as Web Bundles.

Installation

Archives of precompiled binaries for webbundle-cli are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

If you're using Rust, webbundle-cli can be installed with cargo.

cargo install webbundle-cli

Examples

The binary name for webbundle-cli is webbundle.

create

Create example.wbn from the files under build/dist directory. This is similar to tar cvf example.tar build/dist.

$ webbundle create example.wbn build/dist

list

List the contents of example.wbn. This is similar to tar tvf example.tar.

$ webbundle list ./example.wbn

extract

Extract the contents of example.wbn. This is similar to tar xvf example.tar.

$ webbundle extract ./example.wbn

See webbundle --help for detail usage.

webbundle-server

The experimental web server which dynamically serves Web bundles from underlying resources.

webbundle-bench

The benchmark tool for measuring the browser's loading performance with Web bundles.

TODO

The development is at very early stage. There are many TODO items:

• Parser
  • Support b2 format
• Encoder
  • Support b2 format
• Web Bundles Builder
  • Create a Web Bundle from a directory structure
  • Low-level APIs to create and manipulate Web Bundle file
• Use http::Request, http::Response and http::Uri for better ergonomics
• Use async/await to avoid blocking operations
• More CLI subcommands
  • create
  • list
  • extract
  • Make these subcommands more ergonomics
• Focus the performance. Avoid copy as much as possible.
• Split this crate into several crates:
  • webbundle: Core library
  • webbundle-cli: CLI, like a tar command
  • webbundle-ffi: Foreign function interface for C or C++ program, like a chromium.
  • webbundle-server: Experimental http server which can assemble and serve a webbundle dynamically, based on request parameters
  • webbundle-wasm: WebAssembly binding
  • webbundle-bench: The benchmark tool

Contributing

See contributing.md for instructions.