Desktop App

The Coffer Desktop app is the recommended installation path for daily-driver use. It packages everything you need — the daemon, the shim, and the Web UI — in a single installer with no Python required.

What the Desktop app is

The Desktop app is a Tauri 2 shell (Rust + WebView) that bundles the Coffer daemon and MCP shim as PyInstaller-built sidecar binaries. Because the binaries are self-contained, end users need no Python install. The Web UI from spec 002 renders inside the Tauri window.

See Architecture → Distribution for the two-tier release design (CLI-only archive vs. CLI+desktop bundle) and the ADR behind it.

How it runs

On every launch the Desktop app:

1. Detects or spawns the daemon — it reads ~/.coffer/daemon.json to find a running daemon. If none is reachable, it spawns coffer-daemon as a detached background process that survives the Desktop window closing.

2. Deploys the shim + daemon — idempotently copies the bundled coffer-mcp-shim and coffer-daemon to a stable user-writable PATH location:

   • macOS / Linux: ~/.coffer/bin/

   Co-locating the daemon lets the shim auto-spawn it after a reboot, even when the Desktop app isn't running.

3. Shows a system-tray icon — always present while the app is running.

Closing the main window hides it to the tray; the daemon stays alive and your MCP clients keep working. To actually quit, use Quit from the tray menu.

Tray menu

Item	What it does
Open	Restore the main window (the same one the close button hid).
Restart daemon	Stop the local daemon process and start a fresh one on the same port.
Quit	Stop the Desktop process and the daemon, removing the tray icon.

Installation

Download

Go to the GitHub Releases page and download the file for your platform:

Platform	File
macOS, Apple silicon (M-series)	Coffer_<version>_aarch64-unsigned.dmg

Coffer ships macOS (Apple Silicon) builds only. The -unsigned suffix marks the DMG as not yet notarised (see macOS Gatekeeper below). Verify the download against the release's SHA256SUMS file.

Install

• macOS: open the DMG and drag Coffer.app to /Applications.

macOS Gatekeeper

Until Coffer has an Apple Developer ID, the DMG ships unsigned, so on first open macOS may say Coffer is "damaged". (For the "damaged" message, right-click → Open does not help.) Clear the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Coffer.app

If it still won't open, re-apply an ad-hoc signature:

codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/Coffer.app

Notarisation is a current non-goal; the runbook for enabling it once a Developer ID is available lives in docs/distribution/macos-notarization.md.

First launch

On first launch:

• The main window opens to the Resources welcome view (the Web UI documented in the Web UI guide).
• The daemon starts on a free port (default 8000, falling back to 8001–8009) and writes ~/.coffer/daemon.json.
• The shim is deployed to its PATH location (see above).
• The tray icon appears.

If the shim's target directory is not yet on PATH, Coffer shows a one-time prompt on Settings → App with the exact line to add to your shell rc file.

CLI-only alternative

For headless servers or machines where you do not want the Desktop app, download the CLI-only archive (coffer-cli-<triple>.tar.gz) from the same Releases page. It contains coffer (management CLI), coffer-daemon, and coffer-mcp-shim — extract, put them on PATH, and point your MCP clients at the shim (the daemon auto-spawns on first use).

Next steps

• Connect a client →
• Architecture → Distribution