dsh-wsl-tray

中文 | English

A DeepSeek Harness plugin for WSL deployments: it puts a Windows desktop shortcut and a system-tray launcher in front of the DSH web server running inside WSL.

Features

• Double-click the DeepSeek Harness desktop shortcut to start DSH in the background (or reuse an already-running instance). The default browser opens exactly once when DSH is ready (the built-in DSH browser-open is disabled by --no-open; only the tray opens it).
• A DSH fish tray icon appears. Right-click menu:
  • 打开 DeepSeek Harness / open the DSH web page
  • 重新生成桌面快捷方式 / recreate the desktop shortcut
  • 重启 DSH 服务 / restart the DSH service
  • 暂停守护进程 / 恢复守护进程 / pause or resume the watchdog
  • 退出 / exit the tray icon
• Double-clicking the tray icon also opens the DSH web page.
• A watchdog daemon runs inside the tray: it probes the DSH URL on a timer, restarts DSH when the probes fail, gives up after a bounded number of consecutive failed restarts, and writes a full audit trail to watchdog.log (see Watchdog below).
• The plugin's own settings page (Settings → WSL Desktop & Tray) shows live status (tray files + watchdog state) and a button that recreates the desktop shortcut without touching WSL by hand. The page can also show the tail of the watchdog log.
• No console window is shown: the shortcut goes through wscript.exe + VBS and the entire chain is launched with window style 0.

Requirements

• DSH itself must be running inside WSL (WSL_DISTRO_NAME set, /mnt/c accessible).
• Windows must be able to run wscript.exe, powershell.exe, and wsl.exe.
• DSH web 0.1.7-alpha.2 or newer (client-side settings sections + client bundle machinery).

Install

Once published to npm:

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-wsl-tray

Or add it manually to a DSH web profile:

cd ~/.dsh/profiles/web
pnpm add dsh-wsl-tray

and add "dsh-wsl-tray" to package.json:

"dsh": {
  "profile": {
    "bundles": [
      "@deepseek-ai/dsh-base",
      "@deepseek-ai/dsh-web-app",
      "dsh-wsl-tray"
    ]
  }
}

Restart dsh web and open Settings → WSL Desktop & Tray (中文界面为 设置 → WSL 桌面与托盘).

Running from a source checkout

The launcher never starts a checkout from src. A tsx/src host loads plugin packages from lib (the default runtime resolution mode), so the same packages end up twice in one process; symbols do not cross instances, and tool calls fail with undefined state. start.sh therefore only ever launches a checkout's BUILD OUTPUT:

cd ~/deepseek-harness
pnpm run build        # required once, and again after every source change

Then set the checkout path in Settings → WSL Desktop & Tray (either the repository root or its apps/cli directory works). With a path configured:

1. start.sh runs node <checkout>/apps/cli/lib/bin.js web --no-open before anything else — never src, and never whichever dsh happens to be on PATH.
2. When the build output is missing, the launcher writes the reason and the fix to ~/.dsh/dsh-wsl-tray/start.log and exits instead of silently running a different install.
3. Export DSH_WSL_TRAY_AUTO_BUILD=1 in WSL to let the launcher run pnpm run build itself when the output is missing (a full build is slow, so this stays opt-in).
4. When the cli sources are newer than the build output, start.sh logs a WARN ... newer than the build output line, so a forgotten rebuild does not look like a change that did nothing.

Known limitation: the freshness check only scans <checkout>/apps/cli/src; a change under packages/ is not detected, so keep pnpm run build in the loop.

Generated files

The plugin writes five generated files:

File	Location
dsh.ico	%USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-wsl-tray\dsh.ico
dsh-tray.ps1	%USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-wsl-tray\dsh-tray.ps1
dsh-tray.vbs	%USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-wsl-tray\dsh-tray.vbs
start.sh	~/.dsh/dsh-wsl-tray/start.sh
stop.sh	~/.dsh/dsh-wsl-tray/stop.sh

and creates:

%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\DeepSeek Harness.lnk

While the tray runs, the watchdog maintains two runtime files (both are shown on the settings page):

File	Location
watchdog.log	%USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-wsl-tray\watchdog.log (rotated at 512 KB)
watchdog-status.json	%USERPROFILE%\.dsh\dsh-wsl-tray\watchdog-status.json (latest tick)

The shortcut points at wscript.exe, which runs dsh-tray.vbs; the VBS starts the tray PowerShell hidden, and the tray starts start.sh inside WSL through WScript.Shell.Run(..., 0, false).

Watchdog

The watchdog lives inside the tray helper (the one process that is deliberately independent of DSH), and answers the three questions a restart daemon has to:

1. How liveness is judged — an HTTP Invoke-WebRequest probe of the DSH web URL every probeIntervalSec (default 10 s, probe timeout 3 s). Each probe records its status code or error text, so a refused connection (nothing listening), a timeout (hung server) and a bad status stay distinguishable in the log. DSH is only considered DOWN after downThreshold (3) consecutive failed probes.
2. Restart success & giving up — a restart is triggered (stop + start via wsl.exe) and the watchdog waits up to restartWaitSec (180 s) for the URL to answer again: an answer = success, which resets the failure counter; an unanswered window = one failed restart. After maxRestartFailures (3) consecutive failures the watchdog pauses instead of looping forever. It resumes from the tray menu (恢复守护进程), or automatically as soon as DSH answers again.
3. Logging — every probe transition, restart trigger, success/failure and pause/resume is appended to watchdog.log with a timestamp, level and the probe detail; the current state machine snapshot goes to watchdog-status.json every tick. The settings page exposes both through /dsh-wsl-tray/watchdog and /dsh-wsl-tray/watchdog-log.

Phases: starting (initial boot grace) → probing (steady state) → restarting (waiting after a restart) → backoff (cooldown) or paused (give-up / manual pause). The tuning values above are baked into dsh-tray.ps1; change them in src/artifacts.ts (DEFAULT_WATCHDOG_CONFIG) and regenerate.

Install without npm publishing

If npm publishing is not an option, install the prebuilt tarball that is included in this repository:

cd ~/.dsh/profiles/web
pnpm add /path/to/dsh-wsl-tray-github/dist/dsh-wsl-tray-0.1.7.tgz

Then add "dsh-wsl-tray" to the profile bundle list as above.

How it works

1. Hidden launch: shortcut → wscript.exe → VBS → hidden PowerShell tray.
2. DSH stays alive: start.sh runs DSH in the foreground of the hidden wsl.exe session, so WSL does not recycle the process after the one-shot launcher exits.
3. Automatic browser open: a Windows-side timer in the tray polls the DSH URL every 2 seconds and calls Start-Process $webUrl once DSH answers.
4. Watchdog: a second tray timer probes the URL every 10 seconds and runs the state machine described above.
5. Regeneration: the settings page and the tray menu both run dsh-tray.ps1 -Regenerate.

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build
npm pack --dry-run

Known limitations

• Only enabled inside WSL; on non-WSL hosts the settings page reports that the feature is unavailable.
• The watchdog runs only while the tray icon is up: choosing 退出 stops the watchdog and the DSH instance (via the generated stop.sh: a PID file tracks the instance start.sh launched, then a pattern fallback covers bin.js web launches from source checkouts, npm global installs and npx). Add the shortcut to the Windows Startup folder if you want the watchdog to follow Windows boot.
• A DSH web instance started any other way (different flags, another tool) is not tracked by the PID file; stop it by hand (Windows Task Manager or wsl --shutdown) if the pattern fallback does not reach it.