Frequently asked questions
Everything important about what this project is, what it is not, and what you need before installing it.
DeepSeek AI currently ships DeepSeek Harness primarily as a CLI and local Web UI. DeepSeek Harness Desktop is an unofficial community app that hosts that Web UI in a native Wails window on macOS, Windows and Linux.
No. It is independent, open source and not affiliated with DeepSeek AI. The official source is deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness.
The lightweight shell uses npm and pnpm to download and start a pinned version of @deepseek-ai/dsh. Not bundling Node.js keeps release packages around 4β11 MB.
Version 0.1.15 provides a universal macOS DMG for Apple Silicon and Intel, a Windows amd64 executable and a Linux amd64 archive.
No. The desktop app loads the upstream Web UI. Models, sessions, plugins, skills and agent behavior remain upstream responsibilities.
Those are managed by DeepSeek Harness. The shell stores its startup log under ~/.dsh-desktop/logs/ and passes through DSH_HOME when configured.
During a normal close or quit, the app terminates the complete process tree it started. A force-kill or operating-system crash can still prevent graceful cleanup.
macOS packages have been signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple since v0.1.9, so Gatekeeper normally opens them without a prompt. Windows executables are not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show an unknown-publisher warning. Confirm that the file came from the project's GitHub Release before choosing to run it.
No. The first start needs npm access to obtain the pinned DSH package unless it is already cached. DSH also needs network access for cloud model providers.
Desktop v0.1.15 pins @deepseek-ai/dsh@0.1.7-rc.1 to avoid unexpected upstream changes between launches.
