GitHub - runningpixels/conduit: Open-source, local-first desktop AI client and MCP host. Bring your own key for Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — conversations stay on your machine.

A local-first desktop AI assistant. Your conversations stay on your machine.

Conduit is a desktop chat client for large language models, built on Tauri 2 with a Rust core and a React renderer. You bring your own API key, talk to any of eleven providers, and everything — conversations, attachments, artifacts — is stored locally in an encrypted SQLite database. There is no Conduit account, no backend, and no telemetry.

Why Conduit

The renderer never sees your API key. Credentials live in the OS keychain; settings hold only a keychain://conduit/<provider> reference. All network calls happen in Rust. This is enforced by the architecture, not by policy — see docs/architecture/foundation-contracts.md.
Encrypted at rest. AES-256-GCM over attachment and artifact blobs, with a master key wrapped in the OS keychain. Encryption never silently downgrades: if the key is unavailable and encrypted data exists, the app refuses to start rather than fall back to plaintext.
Bring your own provider. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, OpenCode Zen, Groq, DeepSeek, Mistral, LM Studio, Ollama, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
MCP connectors with a real consent gate. Local stdio Model Context Protocol servers run under a supervisor with restart backoff, a concurrency cap, and per-call timeouts. Side-effecting tools prompt before they run, tool output is redacted and size-capped, and it is never re-injected into the prompt.
Artifacts that can't phone home. Model-generated HTML renders in a null-origin sandboxed iframe under a strict CSP with connect-src 'none' and no Tauri bridge. Text, code, JSON and Markdown render through React-escaped renderers with no dangerouslySetInnerHTML anywhere in the safe path.
No telemetry. Update checks are opt-in and send only Conduit-Updater/<version>.

Artifacts

Model-generated code, HTML, JSON and Markdown open in a side panel with preview and source views. HTML renders in a null-origin sandboxed iframe with connect-src 'none' — it cannot reach the network or the Tauri bridge.

MCP connectors

Local stdio MCP servers run under a supervisor. Tool calls are disclosed inline, results are redacted and size-capped, and side-effecting tools prompt for consent before they run.

Status

v0.1.0-rc.2 — pre-release. Installers for Windows, macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Linux are on the releases page. They are not OS-code-signed, so the first launch shows a Gatekeeper or SmartScreen warning. Building from source works too.

This is a working application, not a prototype, but it is a release candidate rather than a 1.0. Expect rough edges.

Area	State
Provider streaming (11 adapters, cancellation, normalization)	Working
Local SQLite persistence, migrations, encryption at rest	Working
MCP connector runtime (stdio transport, consent, supervision)	Working
Artifacts — create, render, edit, export	Working
Multi-round agent loop with tool results	Working
Vision attachments, Mermaid/KaTeX, conversation export	Working
Web search (hosted OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic + local backends)	Working
Update/packaging pipeline	Working — rc.1 built, signed and published on all four targets; the updater itself is not yet verified by a real install
MCP HTTP/SSE transport	Not implemented (stdio only)
OS code-signing	Not done — bundles are unsigned
Cloud sync / accounts	Not planned in this repository

Building from source

Prerequisites

Node 20 and pnpm 10.34.4 (corepack enable && corepack prepare pnpm@10.34.4 --activate)
Rust stable (rustup) — rust-toolchain.toml pins the channel
Platform toolchain:
- Windows — Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the C++ workload. Run ./check-setup.ps1 to verify.
- macOS — Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install), macOS 11+.
- Linux —
```
sudo apt-get install -y libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf build-essential libssl-dev
```

Build and run

git clone https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit
cd conduit
pnpm install
pnpm dev          # Vite on :5173, then the Tauri shell

pnpm build produces a release bundle. On first launch, onboarding asks for a provider key (or point it at a local Ollama instance, which needs no key).

Checks

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace                 # 384 tests
pnpm -C packages/config-schema check   # schema-drift gate
pnpm -C apps/desktop check             # tsc -b
pnpm -C apps/desktop test              # 743 renderer tests

Where your data lives

Everything is under one per-user directory resolved by directories::ProjectDirs:

Platform	Path
Windows	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Conduit\Conduit\data`
macOS	`~/Library/Application Support/com.Conduit.Conduit`
Linux	`~/.local/share/conduit`

It contains settings.json, conduit.sqlite, and the attachments/, artifacts/, exports/, logs/, diagnostics/, updates/ and streams/ folders. API keys are not there — they are in the OS keychain. Deleting that directory resets the app completely.

Architecture

A polyglot monorepo: a Cargo workspace and a pnpm workspace sharing one root.

apps/desktop/            Tauri app — src/ (React renderer) + src-tauri/ (Rust backend)
crates/provider-core/    Provider-agnostic LLM abstraction, adapters, the trust boundary
crates/mcp-runtime/      MCP transport + protocol core (stdio live, HTTP/SSE scaffold)
packages/config-schema/  Generated TS mirror of the Rust schema (@conduit/config-schema)
packages/ui/             Design tokens, primitives, bundled fonts (@conduit/ui)

The invariant everything else follows: the renderer presents state and intent only; Rust owns secrets, persistence, and privileged operations. A chat turn:

React ChatView
  └─ ipc/client.startChatStream(ProviderRequest, onEvent)
       └─ Tauri invoke('start_chat_stream', { request, channel })   ← per-request Channel
            └─ StreamManager
                 ├─ provider_core::get_adapter(active_provider)
                 ├─ build_adapter_context   (key from keychain, base URL from settings)
                 ├─ adapter.stream_chat(request, ctx, CancellationToken)
                 └─ per ProviderEvent: append to the event log (one txn) → channel.send
  Renderer: streamState.ts folds ProviderEvents into AssistantStreamState and renders it

Persistence is an append-only event log plus a materialized message view, with view == fold(events) as a checked invariant — the view is rebuilt from the log on drift or crash recovery.

crates/provider-core/src/schema.rs is the single source of truth for on-wire types; packages/config-schema/src/generated/ is generated from it by ts-rs and CI fails if the two drift. Never hand-edit the generated bindings.

Documentation

docs/project-overview.md — how the pieces fit together
docs/architecture/foundation-contracts.md — the trust boundary
docs/adr/ — nine architecture decision records
docs/schemas/internal-models.md — canonical data shapes
docs/postmortems/ — incident write-ups
docs/release/, docs/support/runbook.md — operations

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Note: Conduit requires contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement so the project can continue to be offered under both the AGPL and a commercial license. The CLA bot will prompt you on your first pull request.

Security

Please do not open public issues for vulnerabilities. See SECURITY.md for private disclosure.

License

If you run a modified version as a network service, AGPL section 13 requires you to offer its source to users. Conduit is a local desktop app, so this does not apply to normal use. See LICENSING.md for scope, the section 7 OpenSSL permission, and commercial-licensing terms; NOTICE for third-party attributions.

Acknowledgements

Built with Tauri, React, sqlx and rustls. Typeset in Geist and Source Serif 4, both OFL-1.1. Syntax highlighting by Prism.