Desktop app

The desktop app is a Tauri 2 shell around the same web interface. It calls the engine in-process: there is no HTTP server, no open port and no background service. When the window is closed, nothing of Dogubako is running.

Released builds are for macOS 15 or newer on Apple silicon. The app also builds and runs on Windows and Linux, but there are no installers for them yet; see Building.

What’s different from the web app

	Desktop app	Self-hosted web app
Where tools run	On this computer	On the server
Accounts	None	Required (owner, admins, users, agents)
File inputs	Local paths; drag files from your file manager	Uploaded to the server, addressed by id
Outputs	Written to the outputs folder; Save… copies them anywhere	Downloaded from the server; expire after the retention period
History	Stored on this device (can be turned off)	Stored per account on the server
Pages	No Files, Account or Admin pages	Files, Account and (for admins) Admin
Permissions	You are trusted like your own shell	Granted per account and token

Where files go

Dogubako keeps its data in one per-user folder:

System	Folder
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/Dogubako
Windows	%APPDATA%\Dogubako
Linux	$XDG_DATA_HOME/dogubako, usually ~/.local/share/dogubako

Inside it:

Path	Holds
outputs/<run id>/	The output files of each run
models/	Downloaded models
engines/	Engines downloaded on demand (macOS)
extensions/	Your extension manifests and trusted.toml
bin/	Engine binaries you want Dogubako to prefer over your PATH

Set DOGUBAKO_HOME to use a different folder. Files you paste or drag in from a web page (which have no path on disk) are staged in your system’s temporary folder.

How it finds engines

On macOS, the app manages most engines itself: FFmpeg, qpdf, Poppler, ExifTool and 7-Zip are built in, and ImageMagick, Tesseract, Ghostscript, Real-ESRGAN, Pandoc and whisper.cpp download into ~/Library/Application Support/Dogubako/engines with one click. For those engines the app uses only its own copies.

For every other engine (LibreOffice, Piper, rembg, and all engines in builds without the managed set, such as development builds or other platforms), Dogubako looks in this order:

1. the path in DOGUBAKO_<ID>_PATH, for example DOGUBAKO_FFMPEG_PATH (this overrides a managed engine too);
2. the bin/ folder above;
3. your PATH;
4. on macOS, the usual Homebrew and MacPorts folders: /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin and /opt/local/bin.

The last step matters because apps opened from the Dock or Finder get a minimal PATH that leaves those folders out.

Settings → Dependencies shows what was found, the version, and the install command for your system. If you install an engine while Dogubako is open, click refresh there.

Drag and drop

Drag files from your file manager onto a file field to fill it, or anywhere else in the window to open the drop screen. Dropped files are used in place; Dogubako never modifies its inputs unless a tool explicitly says it will (such as batch rename with apply).

Privacy

Your files are processed on this computer. The only network traffic comes from tools whose job is the network (DNS lookups, HTTP header checks and so on), from model and engine downloads you start yourself, and from plain words if you turn it on, which sends your request, file names and tool results (not the files) to the model provider you chose. There is no telemetry.