DSH Desktop

I just wanted to publish this project, but Claude said "WE HAVE TO WRITE THAT THIS REPO IS UNOFFICIAL EVERYWHERE WE CAN". So here it is...

Desktop launcher, background service and update prompt for
DeepSeek Harness.

Not affiliated with DeepSeek

This is an independent community project. It is not an official DeepSeek
product, and it is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with DeepSeek
in any way. All credit for the harness itself belongs upstream.

"DeepSeek" and "DeepSeek Harness" are trademarks of their respective owner.
They are used here only to describe truthfully what this project works with,
as the upstream brand guidelines
permit. The application icon is the upstream project's own mark, reused
from the MIT-licensed repository; it indicates what this launcher launches and
is not a claim of authorship or official status. If the upstream project would
rather it were not used this way, open an issue and it will be changed.

What it adds

DeepSeek Harness ships a browser UI (dsh web) and nothing else: no desktop
app, no background service, and no updater — there is no version check and
no "update available" button anywhere in it. DSH Desktop adds exactly those
three things, and deliberately nothing more:

It contributes no interface of its own. The only page it ever shows is the
harness's own web UI. Everything this app has to say — progress, failures,
update offers — it says through native OS dialogs.

Install

Download an installer from Releases:

macOS is not built yet: it needs signing and notarisation on top of a build,
without which Gatekeeper refuses a downloaded .dmg outright.

No .msi is published. It was built at first and dropped: it did not work,
and it was the slow one anyway — measured on one machine with identical content,
a plain file copy of the payload took 7.6 s, the NSIS installer 10 s, and the
MSI over a minute. MSI registers every one of the ~14,000 bundled files as its
own component and journals each for rollback, which no amount of trimming fixes.

On Linux the .AppImage needs no installation at all: make it executable and
run it. The .deb and .rpm additionally add a menu entry.

Nothing else needs to be installed. No Node.js, no npm, no pnpm, no git, no
checkout: the app ships its own Node runtime and its own package manager. Install
it and run it.

(If the machine happens to have a suitable Node of its own, and the bundled copy
somehow will not run, the app falls back to it rather than refusing to start.)

How it works

Nothing is patched, forked or vendored. Upstream is consumed exactly as
published on npm:

<app data>/runtimes/<version>/node_modules/@deepseek-ai/dsh/lib/bin.js

Each version lands in its own directory, so an update is a directory switch
rather than a mutation, and the previous version stays on disk as a rollback
target. On launch the app starts that binary as dsh web --no-open --port 0,
reads the loopback URL the host prints, and opens it in a native window.

What is bundled, and why

All three are staged at build time, so installation is the only step that needs
the network. First launch reads the bundled harness in place — verified to work
from a write-denied directory, which is what Program Files is — and starts in
about two seconds. Updates still come from npm, into app data, on top.

Why pnpm and not npm

The harness is not one package but roughly a hundred separately published
@deepseek-ai/dsh-* modules, ~500 packages once resolved. Measured on one
machine, same network and registry:

So the package manager cannot be left to whatever is on the machine: with npm,
first launch is not slow, it is effectively broken. A copy of pnpm (~19 MB) is
shipped inside the app and driven directly, which also means the machine needs
no package manager of its own.

Budget about 250 MB per installed harness version; the app keeps the current one
and one previous, and files are hardlinked from a shared store, so two versions
cost far less than twice that.

That is also what keeps updates simple: updating means fetching a newer
upstream, not rebasing local changes onto it, because there are no local
changes to rebase.

Build from source

Needs Rust, Node.js and the
Tauri prerequisites for your platform.

npm install
npm run dev      # run it
npm run build    # produce installers for the current platform

Cross-platform artifacts are built by CI on tag push; a single machine can only
bundle for its own OS.

License

MIT. DeepSeek Harness itself is MIT-licensed upstream and is not
redistributed here — it is downloaded from npm at runtime.