The status snapshot tore down on every management retry because state.Status() blanks the status when an error is wrapped, and the SubscribeStatus stream propagated that as FailedPrecondition. The UI treated any stream error as "daemon not running" and flickered the tray to Not running between retries. Disconnect was also unresponsive: Down set Idle before the retry goroutine exited, which then overwrote it with Set(Connecting) on the next attempt; the backoff sleep (up to 15s) wasn't context-aware, so the goroutine kept running long after actCancel. - buildStatusResponse falls back to the underlying status (via new state.CurrentStatus) instead of breaking the stream on wrapped errors. - UI only flips to DaemonUnavailable on codes.Unavailable / non-status errors, so a live daemon returning FailedPrecondition is not reported as down. - connect retry uses backoff.WithContext so actCancel interrupts the inter-attempt sleep, and skips Wrap(err) when the dial fails due to ctx cancellation. - Down sets Idle after waiting for giveUpChan, so the retry goroutine can no longer race the disconnect. - Tray hides Connect during Connecting and keeps Disconnect enabled so the user can abort an in-flight connection attempt.
NetBird desktop UI (Wails3 + React)
Replaces client/ui (Fyne). One binary on Windows / macOS / Linux,
talks to the NetBird daemon over gRPC, renders a React frontend in a
WebView.
Prerequisites
- Go ≥ 1.25, Node ≥ 20, pnpm (
corepack enable && corepack prepare pnpm@latest --activate) wails3CLI:go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v3/cmd/wails3@latesttask:go install github.com/go-task/task/v3/cmd/task@latest- A running NetBird daemon (default:
unix:///var/run/netbird.sock, Windowstcp://127.0.0.1:41731) - Linux only:
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev,libgtk-3-dev,libayatana-appindicator3-dev
Develop without rebuilding
cd client/ui
task dev
task dev runs Vite (port 9245) + the Go binary + a *.go watcher.
Frontend edits hot-reload instantly. Go edits trigger a rebuild and
relaunch. Pass daemon flags after --:
task dev -- --daemon-addr=tcp://127.0.0.1:41731
For pure UI work (no native window, fastest loop):
cd frontend && pnpm dev
Production build
task build
Output in bin/. Frontend assets are embedded into the binary.
Cross-compile Windows from Linux
Install the mingw-w64 toolchain once:
sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64 # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install mingw64-gcc # Fedora
sudo pacman -S mingw-w64-gcc # Arch
Then:
CGO_ENABLED=1 task windows:build
Produces bin/netbird-ui.exe. macOS cross-compile from Linux is not
supported (signing and notarization need a real Mac).
Windows console build (logs in the terminal)
Default windows:build links the binary as a Windows GUI app, which
detaches from the launching console — logrus output, fmt.Println,
and panics go nowhere visible. To debug tray/event/daemon issues:
CGO_ENABLED=1 task windows:build:console
Produces bin/netbird-ui-console.exe. Run it from cmd.exe /
PowerShell / Windows Terminal and stdout/stderr land in that
terminal. Same flag works on a native Windows build (drop the
CGO_ENABLED=1 if your toolchain already has it set).
Regenerating bindings
When a Go service signature changes:
wails3 generate bindings
task dev does this automatically on *.go save.
Tray icons
Source SVGs live in assets/svg/ (state.svg + state-macos.svg). After editing
any SVG, rasterize to the PNGs the Go side embeds:
task common:generate:tray:icons
Requires Inkscape. Commit the resulting assets/*.png files alongside the
SVG change so CI doesn't need Inkscape installed.