dsh-desktop-electron

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An Electron desktop shell for the DeepSeek Harness (dsh) Web GUI: it spawns dsh web, waits for the server's readiness line, and hosts the GUI in a standalone window with tray residency.

The shell targets the public @deepseek-ai/dsh package. It relies only on the maintained dsh web --host <host> --port <port> arguments and the dsh web: <URL> readiness line.

This repository is an independently maintained DSH desktop-shell project. It carries no harness source code; the backend is provided by a dsh installation on the host.

What this is

The Web GUI is the harness's richest surface but normally lives in a browser tab: no taskbar presence, no tray, and every launch means opening a terminal and keeping the tab alive. This shell makes it a real desktop window.

It is a shell only. It bundles no Node runtime and no harness closure — it runs whatever dsh web your machine already provides, so it stays correct across harness upgrades instead of pinning a snapshot.

Window	Sandboxed renderer (sandbox: true, contextIsolation: true, nodeIntegration: false, no preload) — the GUI is a normal web application
Tray residency	Closing the window hides it; the server keeps running. Only Quit terminates the server
Single instance	A second launch focuses the existing window instead of starting a second server
No orphans	Quit tree-kills the server; a reaper child also tree-kills it if the main process is ever hard-killed
Platforms	Windows, macOS, Linux — pure Node/npm toolchain, no Rust/Go/Swift

Requirements

A working dsh web, resolved in this order:

1. DSH_BIN — an explicit path to a dsh executable;
2. DSH_HOME — a harness checkout root (~/.dsh/source/current for an install.sh install). Its built apps/cli/lib/bin.js is preferred; otherwise the tsx source launch is used, exactly as the checkout's own pnpm run dsh does;
3. dsh on PATH.

On Windows, the spawn boundary automatically resolves npm command shims reached through either DSH_BIN or PATH, including .cmd files. Arguments remain a separate vector: the shell does not enable a general command shell and does not require users to locate the package's JavaScript entry point.

The server always listens on 127.0.0.1 with an OS-assigned port (--port 0), so it can never collide with an existing dsh web — a browser instance and this shell can run side by side.

Run from source

npm install
DSH_HOME=~/.dsh/source/current npm run dev

Package

npm run dist        # installers under release/
npm run dist:dir    # unpacked dir only, for a quick smoke

Installers are unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will warn on first run. The packaged app still needs a dsh on the host — see Requirements.

Behavior notes

• Windows permission mode. Windows has no harness confinement backend, so the CLI's default workspace-write mode cannot boot there. When DSH_PERMISSION_MODE is unset the shell falls back to danger-full-access (approval prompts disabled) and logs a warning. Set DSH_PERMISSION_MODE explicitly to override.
• Tree termination. On Windows the kill is taskkill /T /F, because child.kill() is TerminateProcess of the direct child only. On POSIX the server is spawned detached and the whole process group is signalled, SIGTERM then SIGKILL after a grace period. The server does not run a graceful-dispose path; session data is written per event to JSONL, so a killed server loses nothing already logged.
• External links. Anything that opens a new window or navigates off the server origin goes to the system browser, restricted to http(s); unparsable targets are dropped.
• Workspace semantics are the CLI's: the invoking directory is the default project root. Launching from a desktop shortcut starts in the shell's cwd, so prefer opening the app from a project directory or picking the Workspace in the GUI.
• Logs. The server's stdout is forwarded with a [dsh web] prefix; run the app from a terminal to see both streams.

Tests

npm test        # 31 keyless cases: command resolution/spawn, readiness parsing, HTTP polling
npm run test:electron:windows # built Electron lifecycle through a Windows npm .cmd shim
npm run typecheck
npm run dist:dir # unpacked app plus packaged production-closure verification

Credits

The shell, the launcher, and the process-tree primitive were developed in a harness fork and contributed upstream; this repository is the standalone extraction. Related standalone shells: dsh-desktop (Go/Wails, Windows), dsh-desktop-mac (Swift/WKWebView), deepseek-harness-desktop (Wails + Node SEA).

License

MIT, matching the harness.