Stoat for Desktop

Application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Self-hostable fork. This build is maintained independently and publishes releases to the project's own Forgejo instance.

Highlights

• Self-hosted & modified instances — enter any instance URL directly in the app UI (first-run wizard, tray → Settings… or Ctrl/Cmd + ,). Self-signed certificates are supported as an opt-in.
• Stability first — automatic recovery from network failures, renderer crashes and GPU crashes (falls back to software rendering instead of showing a black screen); optional services (tray, Discord RPC, PipeWire) can never prevent the app from starting.
• Lightweight — no background auto-updater, optional integrations are off by default, tight failure handling.
• Screen sharing on Linux — detects our own window (marked with isSelf) and never captures the app's own sound (loopbackWithMute, PipeWire routing skips our own audio clients).
• Multi-language UI — English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese (auto-detected from the system).

Installation

• Prebuilt archives for Windows, macOS and Linux are attached to the releases of this repository.

Development Guide

Contribution guidelines for Desktop app TBA!

Before getting started, you'll want to install:

• Git
• mise-en-place

Then proceed to setup:

# clone the repository
git clone --recursive https://github.com/stoatchat/for-desktop stoat-for-desktop
cd stoat-for-desktop

# Install tools from mise
mise install

# install all packages
mise install:frozen

# start the application
mise dev
# ... or build the bundle
mise build
# ... or build all distributables
mise make

Various useful commands for development testing:

# connect to the development server
mise exec -- pnpm start -- --force-server http://localhost:5173

# test the flatpak (after `make`)
mise exec -- pnpm install:flatpak
mise exec -- pnpm run:flatpak
# ... also connect to dev server like so:
mise exec -- pnpm run:flatpak --force-server http://localhost:5173

# Nix-specific instructions for testing
nix develop
pnpm package
pnpm run:nix
# ... as before:
pnpm run:nix --force-server=http://localhost:5173
# a better solution would be telling
# Electron Forge where system Electron is

Pulling in Stoat's assets

If you want to pull in Stoat brand assets after pulling, run the following:

# update the assets
mise assets

Currently, this is required to build, any forks are expected to provide their own assets.