First production build

Last lesson of the chapter — produce a real binary you can run on any machine. Two commands cover it: wails build for the bare .exe / .app, wails build -nsis for a Windows installer.

The basic build

$wails build

Produces a single binary for your current OS / arch in build/bin/:

• Windows: build/bin/field-pos.exe (~15 MB)
• macOS: build/bin/field-pos.app (a bundle)
• Linux: build/bin/field-pos (ELF binary)

Cross-compiling for Windows from Mac/Linux

$wails build -platform windows/amd64

Wails uses Go's cross-compile. The frontend bundle is the same; only the Go binary differs. Result lands in build/bin/field-pos.exe.

Build with NSIS installer

$wails build -nsis

Produces:

• field-pos.exe — raw binary (~15 MB)
• field-pos-amd64-installer.exe — NSIS installer (~22 MB)

The installer is the customer-facing artifact. It installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\field-pos\ per-user — no UAC, no admin needed.

Build flags worth knowing

# Smaller binary — strips debug symbols
$wails build -trimpath -ldflags "-s -w"
# Custom output name
$wails build -o "FieldPOS-v1.0.0.exe"
# All platforms in one shot
$wails build -platform windows/amd64,darwin/arm64,linux/amd64

-ldflags "-s -w" can shave 30% off the binary size. Worth it for distribution.

Where the assets come from

Your app icon, splash image, and metadata come from build/windows/ (and parallel folders for darwin/, linux/). The Grit scaffold ships placeholders. Swap them for your brand assets before shipping.

• build/windows/icon.ico — app icon (multi-resolution .ico)
• build/windows/info.json — version + company metadata
• build/darwin/icon.icns — macOS bundle icon

What's next

Chapter 2 — Offline-first. Local SQLite, the outbox pattern for queued writes, and the sync engine that pushes changes when you reconnect.