Configuring Bevy

Bevy is very modular and configurable. It is implemented as many separate cargo crates, allowing you to remove the parts you don't need. Higher-level functionality is built on top of lower-level foundational crates, and can be disabled or replaced with alternatives.

The lower-level core crates (like the Bevy ECS) can also be used completely standalone, or integrated into otherwise non-Bevy projects.

Bevy Cargo Features

In Bevy projects, you can enable/disable various parts of Bevy using cargo features.

Many common features are enabled by default. If you want to disable some of them, note that, unfortunately, Cargo does not let you disable individual default features, so you need to disable all default bevy features and re-enable the ones you need.

Here is how you might configure your Bevy:

[dependencies.bevy]
version = "0.9"
# Disable the default features if there are any that you do not want
default-features = false
features = [
  # These are the default features:
  # (re-enable whichever you like)

  # Bevy functionality:
  "bevy_asset",         # Assets management
  "bevy_scene",         # Scenes management
  "bevy_gilrs",         # Gamepad input support
  "bevy_audio",         # Builtin audio
  "bevy_winit",         # Window management
  "animation",          # Animation support
  "x11",                # Linux: Support X11 windowing system
  "filesystem_watcher", # Asset hot-reloading
  "render",             # Graphics Rendering

  ## "render" actually just includes:
  ## (feel free to use just a subset of these, instead of "render")
  "bevy_render",        # Rendering framework core
  "bevy_core_pipeline", # Common rendering abstractions
  "bevy_sprite",        # 2D (sprites) rendering
  "bevy_pbr",           # 3D (physically-based) rendering
  "bevy_gltf",          # GLTF 3D assets format support
  "bevy_text",          # Text/font rendering
  "bevy_ui",            # UI toolkit

  # File formats:
  "png",
  "hdr",
  "vorbis",

  # These are other features that may be of interest:
  # (add any of these that you need)

  # Bevy functionality:
  "wayland",              # Linux: Support Wayland windowing system
  "subpixel_glyph_atlas", # Subpixel antialiasing for text/fonts
  "serialize",            # Support for `serde` Serialize/Deserialize
  "bevy_dynamic_plugin"   # Support for loading of `DynamicPlugin`s

  # File formats:
  "ktx2", # preferred format for GPU textures
  "dds",
  "jpeg",
  "bmp",
  "tga",
  "basis-universal",
  "zstd", # needed if using zstd in KTX2 files
  "flac",
  "mp3",
  "wav",

  # Development/Debug features:
  "dynamic",      # Dynamic linking for faster compile-times
  "trace",        # Enable tracing for performance measurement
  "trace_tracy",  # Tracing using `tracy`
  "trace_chrome", # Tracing using the Chrome format
  "wgpu_trace",   # WGPU/rendering tracing
]

(See here for a full list of Bevy's cargo features.)

Graphics / Rendering

For a graphical application or game (most Bevy projects), you can include render and bevy_winit. For Linux support, you need at least one of x11 or wayland.

However, render is a meta-feature; it simply enables all the graphics-related features of Bevy. If you want, you can strip it down and include only what you need.

bevy_render and bevy_core_pipeline are required for any application using Bevy rendering.

If you only need 2D and no 3D, add bevy_sprite.

If you only need 3D and no 2D, add bevy_pbr. If you are loading 3D models from GLTF files, add bevy_gltf.

If you are using Bevy UI, you need bevy_text and bevy_ui.

If you don't need any graphics (like for a dedicated game server, scientific simulation, etc.), you may remove all of these features.

Audio

Bevy's audio is very limited in functionality. It is recommended that you use the bevy_kira_audio plugin instead. Disable bevy_audio and vorbis.

See this page for more information.

File Formats

You can use the relevant cargo features to enable/disable support for loading assets with various different file formats.

See here for more information.

Input Devices

If you do not care about gamepad (controller/joystick) support, you can disable bevy_gilrs.

Linux Windowing Backend

On Linux, you can choose to support X11, Wayland, or both. Only x11 is enabled by default, as it is the legacy system that should be compatible with most/all distributions, to make your builds smaller and compile faster. You might want to additionally enable wayland, to fully and natively support modern Linux environments. This will add a few extra transitive dependencies to your project.

Asset hot-reloading

The filesystem_watcher feature controls support for hot-reloading of assets, supported on desktop platforms.

Development Features

While you are developing your project, these features might be useful:

Dynamic Linking

dynamic causes Bevy to be built and linked as a shared/dynamic library. This will make incremental builds much faster.

This is only supported on desktop platforms. Known to work very well on Linux. Windows and macOS might have issues.

Do not enable this for release builds you intend to publish to other people. It introduces unneeded complexity (you need to bundle extra files) and potential for things to not work correctly. Use this only during development.

For this reason, it may be convenient to specify the feature as a commandline option to cargo, instead of putting it in your Cargo.toml. Simply run your project like this:

cargo run --features bevy/dynamic

Tracing

The features trace and wgpu_trace may be useful for profiling and diagnosing performance issues.

trace_chrome and trace_tracy choose the backend you want to use to visualize the traces.