Building from source

Abe is a Tauri 2 app: a Rust backend with a React and TypeScript interface. Building it yourself takes a few minutes once the prerequisites are installed.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20 or later (with npm)
• Rust, stable toolchain, via rustup
• The Tauri 2 system dependencies for your OS:

Windows

• Microsoft C++ Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• WebView2 runtime (already installed on Windows 11; the Evergreen bootstrapper covers Windows 10)
• Rust with the MSVC toolchain: rustup default stable-msvc

macOS

• Xcode Command Line Tools: xcode-select --install

Linux

On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file \
  libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev libasound2-dev

Other distributions: see the Tauri prerequisites. libasound2-dev (ALSA) is needed for audio capture.

The official Tauri prerequisites guide has full details for every platform.

Build and run

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/HardHeadHackerHead/honest-abe.git
   cd honest-abe

2. Install JavaScript dependencies:

   npm install

3. Run in development mode, with hot reload for the interface:

   npm run tauri dev

   The first run compiles the Rust backend and takes a while. Later runs are much faster.

4. Build an installer for your platform:

   npm run tauri build

   Output lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.

Notes

• Code signing: your own builds are unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will warn the first time you open them. That’s expected.
• Updates: builds from source have the auto-updater off by default, so they never try to replace themselves with official binaries.
• macOS permissions are granted per app bundle. A dev build counts as a different app from the installed release, so macOS asks for Microphone, Accessibility and Input Monitoring again.

Ready to change something? See Contributing.