Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer

Deskreen

Website: https://deskreen.com

▶️ Deskreen Youtube channel (video tutorials, demos, use cases for Deskreen day to day usage)

Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer

Deskreen is an electron.js based application that uses WebRTC to make a live stream of your desktop to a web browser on any device. It is built on top of Electron React Boilerplate For better security mechanism, end-to-end encryption is implemented, which is inspired by darkwire.io. The difference is that it is rewritten in Typescript and transformed to use node-forge instead of window.crypto.subtle. Why this was made? Because a client served with http without SSL, which makes window.crypto.subtle unavailable.

Deskreen FAQ

Get Started for translators

Want to add a new language support for Deskreen? Or you found a typo in existing translations of Deskreen App or website? Here are step by step guides:

• How to add a new language to Deskreen App and Website
• How to fix a typo in Deskreen App or Website

Deskreen Github Discussion Threads

Read and Respect our Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct When Writing in our Discussion Threads.

Announcements Channel in Discussions

Some progress and updates on Deskreen can be found here.

• Q&A General - for general questions about Deskreen.

• Bugs General - for general bug reports if you don’t know dev environment details. Please include Deskreen version! If you saw a bug and know your dev environment, and how to reproduce it, please consider opening a new Issue labeled as Bug and provide full details.

• General Discussion - for general discussion. For example how did you find out about Deskreen? Or send cheers and thanks to anyone in Deskreen’s community members. 🎉

• Use Cases for Deskreen - let our community know how you use Deskreen in this thread.

• Enhancements and New Features for Deskreen - share your ideas of what improvements can be done to Deskreen. Issues created with enhancement tag should be related to some concrete example of change in UI, Security patch, Performance improvement with some concrete notes on how you think the problem should be approached. Otherwise for general improvements with short paragraphs post your thoughts here.

• Virtual Display Drivers Knowledge Base | Getting Rid From Virtual Display Plugs - share your knowledge or useful links on how to create a virtual display for any operating system. Links to source code are highly appreciated.

• Cast Audio with Video when screen sharing using WebRTC in Electron | Drivers to pipe audio output as an audio input source that can be read by ElectronJS WebRTC and streamed to client along with video - this feature has been requested multiple times, but it has a long way to go. Share your knowledge or useful links on how to get built in system audio output and put it to WebRTC stream so that client viewing device will be able to play it along with the video stream.

NOTE: We are looking for a solution to get rid from Dummy Display Plugs while using Deskreen as a second screen. Your code support is highly valuable and welcome in Deskreen!

Display Dummy Plugs are good temporary solution, but it is not that good for everyone. If you are a seasoned Windows or Linux or MacOS hacker with a knowledge of low level tweaks and tricks, you can help us to make Deskreen better! On a long run Deskreen seeks for getting rid of Display Dummy Plugs, because most people don’t like using them. Sometimes they can’t use them because all available display ports are already taken. So we need to have native drivers for Win / Mac / Linux that will help to enable virtual display without Dummy Display Plugs. There are already working commercial solutions out there with their own drivers which they don’t disclose, but this task is doable with a help of entire community. The goal of Deskreen is to enable community power and knowledge to overcome these technical challenges and make it a go-to second screen solution that everyone will benefit from!

We plan on making virtual display driver support for each of three main operating systems and place all OS related codes in ./drivers subdirectory of this project. You can find brief requirements for driver API in ./drivers/README.md.

Share your valuable knowledge on how to create virtual desktop without a Dummy Display Plug in this discussion thread.

Thank you in advance!

Installing with binaries

Windows

• Get the .msi or .exe file from Releases

Mac

• Get the .dmg file from Releases

• Or get from Homebrew: brew install --cask deskreen

Linux

• Debian and Ubuntu based distributions (deb)

• Enterprise Linux based distributions (rpm)

• Arch Linux AUR Package

• AppImage for other distributions

Get Started for Developers

Run yarn test-all locally to make sure you don’t have any errors, before submitting your PR

Prerequisites

You will need to have node npm and yarn installed globally on your machine.

1. git clone this repo
2. cd app/client; yarn install ; cd ../../ ; yarn install
3. yarn dev – run in dev mode with live updates

Useful yarn commands

yarn start – run in production mode to test, without packaging yarn package – to package an app and make executables available in release folder

for more yarn commands look at package.json

How to run tests

yarn test – run all unit tests yarn build-ux && yarn test-ux – run User Experience tests (no tests for app/client yet)

TODO: add e2e tests with host + client app interaction

run tests of host app

yarn test-watch-not-silent – run tests in watch mode with console logs only for host app, excluding app/client yarn test -- -u – update snapshots

run tests for app/client

yarn test – run client tests in watch mode test:nowatch – run client tests a single time yarn test -- -u – update snapshots

Generate test coverage results

yarn coverage – when run from project root, generates a coverage report for host and app/client

How to regenerate snapshots if you have tests failing when running yarn test?

in root ./ folder of project run this:

yarn jest --updateSnapshot

in Deskreen Viewer ./app/client folder of project run this:

cd app/client
SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true yarn test:nowatch -- -u

Run yarn test-all locally to make sure you don’t have any errors, before submitting your PR

Instruction for running a local Sonar Qube, community edition

Prerequisites

You need to install Sonar Qube community edition for your machine. And sonar-scanner. Then add sonar scanner to your PATH.

You need to run sonar-scanner separately on root directory and on app/client directory.

Luckily for you sonar scanner is automatically triggered after husky checks. So you only need to install and configure SonarCube locally and create two separate projects in SonarCube panel. First project for host app, and second project for client viewer app. TODO: add how to get started with local SonarCube for Deskreen in details.

Documentation

High level architecture design

WebRTC Screen Sharing Session Initiation Step by Step

Note on versioning:

• All versions git tags should start with v ex. v1.0.0
• Before making a new release with git push <version-tagname> set version to <version-tagname> ! without v in the beginning! (ex. 1.0.0 – not start with v) in these three files:
  • package.json – in version key ex. 1.0.0
  • app/package.json – in version key ex. 1.0.0
  • app/package-lock.json – in version key ex. 1.0.0

Found typo on https://deskreen.com ?

You can submit your pull request with fix on Deskreen website repo

Maintainer

• Pavlo (Paul) Buidenkov

License

AGPL-3.0 License © Pavlo (Paul) Buidenkov

Copyright

Deskreen Logo PNG Image – © Nadiia Plaunova

Apache 2.0 © blueprintjs

MIT © Electron React Boilerplate

simple-peer MIT. Copyright (c) Feross Aboukhadijeh

GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2 node-forge

ISC Copyright (c) 2019, Mapbox pixelmatch

Thanks

🙏 Special thanks to Electron React Boilerplate community for providing a good kickstart template boilerplate code for electron project, that really helped a lot to get started with development of Deskreen.

🙏 Thanks to Github workflows for enabling a robust CI pipeline for the needs of ‘forging’ 🛠️ Deskreen.

🙏 Many thanks to all 🌍 open source community members and maintainers of libraries used in this project.

Donate

Click to donate on Deskreen’s Patreon page

Click to donate on Deskreen’s Opencollective page