cassady/cassady-desktop/README.md

Cassady Desktop

Cassady Desktop is the v0.4.0 desktop preview. It uses the same Cassady config, providers, tools, approval policy, and ~/.cass/conversations/*.jsonl sessions as the terminal CLI.

Launch from a release archive

macOS and Linux release archives include three binaries:

• cass
• cassady
• cassady-desktop

Keep them in the same directory or put all three on PATH, then launch the desktop app with:

cass desktop

cass desktop starts cassady-desktop as a detached background process, so you can close the terminal after the window opens. For debugging, keep it attached with:

cass desktop --foreground

If the desktop binary is somewhere else, set:

CASSADY_DESKTOP_BIN=/path/to/cassady-desktop cass desktop

Run cass setup first if Cassady has no configured provider.

Development

From the repository root:

cd cassady-desktop
npm install
cargo tauri build --target aarch64-apple-darwin

cargo tauri build runs the frontend build and embeds the generated assets into the standalone binary. A plain cargo build -p cassady-desktop is useful for Rust checks, but do not package that output because it may run in Tauri dev-asset mode and open to a blank window when copied elsewhere.

For a GUI dev session, run the Vite dev server and the Tauri app using your local Tauri workflow. Release packaging uses the raw cassady-desktop binary, not DMG, app bundle, AppImage, MSI, or other installer artifacts.