underway2014/desktopui

ZeroTier Desktop Tray Application and UI

ZeroTier Desktop Tray Application and User Interface

This is (as of ZeroTier 1.8) the system tray application and user interface for controlling a local ZeroTier service on Windows, macOS, and (soon) Linux systems.

It runs a very tiny tray application that displays service status, network status, and allows some basic configuration operations, and then launches a system web view container when the user wishes to display a full control panel. The web view dies when this window is closed, so unlike Electron-based or other web technology based system tray apps it does not hog memory while idle.

Plumbing and tray application glue code is written in Rust. UI control panels are written using React and ElasticUI.

Building

Only macOS and Windows are currently supported. Linux may build but there are still outstanding issues. We're working on full Linux support at least for popular Linux desktop environments that support relatively standard tray application APIs.

Building the full HTML/JS/CSS UI bundle is a bit cumbersome but is only required if you make changes to the source code or themes under the ui directory. A pre-built copy of the UI is shipped in the repository to make simple builds easier and significantly faster.

macOS

Prerequisites

• Rust (and cargo) with targets x86_64-apple-darwin and aarch64-apple-darwin installed to enable universal binaries to be built.
• Xcode with standard command line tools and SDKs.
• We ship the JavaScript UI bundle pre-built. If you want to modify the JavaScript parts of the UI you need:
  • NodeJS (we use the Node package from Homebrew)
  • The yarn package manager for NodeJS.

To build on macOS you should just be able to type make from the project root. If all the necessary dependencies are present it should build a ZeroTier.app application in the current directory.

To rebuild the UI, change into ui/ and type yarn install (this is needed only once) and yarn build. As discussed above this is optional and is only needed if you make control panel UI changes.

Windows

Prerequisites

• Rust (and cargo) with targets x86_64-pc-windows-msvc and i686-pc-windows-msvc installed.
• Microsoft Visual Studio (we use 2019) with both 32-bit and 64-bit X86 targets and with appropriate desktop application SDKs.
• GCC/G++ with support for both 64-bit and 32-bit builds (we use the linked distribution). Yes, we need both Visual Studio and GCC with GNU make.

To build native applications for Windows, just type make. This assumes that GNU make, GCC, and Cargo are in your path. The result will be two native EXEs in target\x86_64-pc-windows-msvc\release and target\i686-pc-windows-msvc\release. We plan to add native support for Windows on ARM64 soon, both for this UI application and for ZeroTier itself.

Building the web bundle part of the UI on Windows has never been done and those tool chains tend to be unfriendly to Windows. We recommend doing yarn build stuff in Linux or macOS. It should work in the Linux subsystem for Windows. As mentioned above we ship this pre-built to make builds easy if you don't need to modify the JavaScript code.

Linux, FreeBSD, Other Open Source Desktops

Coming soon.

Directly Incorporated Third Party Code

The ZeroTier desktop UI uses forked and slightly modified versions of the following third party code:

• Tray by Serge Zaitsev, forked to slightly modify behavior in regard to loop timeouts and Mac application settings. We also manually applied a pull request that fixes builds on ARM64 macOS. (Retains the MIT license.)
• Rust web-view by multiple contributors, forked to modify Mac application behavior and add some custom functionality around copy/paste. (Retains the MIT license.)

Other third party dependencies are included in the normal way. See Cargo.toml and ui/package.json for these.

License

The main UI code in src and ui is copyright ZeroTier, Inc. and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0.

Code in tray and web-view is licensed under the MIT license, which is the original license used by the upstream projects.