bext companion

A native desktop app built with Tauri that gives you a GUI for your bext fleet. It sits in your system tray and connects to your bext instances over HTTP.

What it does

Feature	Description
System tray	Color-coded status indicator, quick actions, native notifications
Instance management	Connect to local and remote instances, health polling, auto-discovery
Request inspector	Live SSE waterfall view, HAR export, request replay
Cache explorer	Browse ISR, fragment, and tenant caches, manual invalidation
Config editor	Visual TOML editor for `bext.config.toml` with validation and diff view
Flow debugger	Durable workflow timeline, SQLite WAL viewer, crash recovery replay
Realtime monitor	Topic tree visualization, pub/sub inspection, message replay
Plugin workshop	Plugin scaffolding, live QuickJS playground, WASM inspector
Observability	Structured log tailing, metrics sparklines, distributed trace viewer
Conformance	Run the bext conformance suite against any instance and track scores

Licensing

The companion app is free with Community for basic features (instance management, request inspector, cache explorer). Premium features (flow debugger, plugin workshop, advanced observability) require an Enterprise license key.

Installation

Pre-built binaries

Download from companion.bext.dev/download:

- macOS — .dmg (Universal binary, Apple Silicon + Intel)

- Linux — .deb (Debian/Ubuntu) or .AppImage (universal)

Build from source

Requires Rust 1.75+ and system dependencies for Tauri:

cargo install bext-companion

Quick start

1. Download and install the companion app 2. Launch it — it appears in your system tray 3. Click the tray icon and select Add Instance 4. Enter your bext server's admin URL (e.g. http://localhost:3000/__bext/admin) 5. The companion connects and starts polling health data

For remote instances, see Connecting Instances.

Global shortcut

Press Cmd+Shift+B (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+B (Linux/Windows) to toggle the companion window from anywhere.