Beadbox: Desktop app shipping Next.js + WebSocket server via Tauri sidecar

[nmelo]

We built Beadbox, a native desktop GUI for the beads issue tracker. The interesting part for this community: we bundle a full Node.js runtime as a Tauri sidecar to run Next.js 16 + a WebSocket server inside a native app.

Why not Electron? Tauri gives us native window chrome and the system WebView. Our bundle is ~160MB total (84MB is the Node binary). A bare Electron app starts around 200MB with a bundled Chromium.

Stack: Next.js 16, React 19, Tauri v2 (Rust + WebView), shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS v4, pnpm

How it works:

1. Rust finds two free TCP ports at startup
2. Spawns node server.js (Next.js standalone) and node ws-server.js (WebSocket)
3. Polls until the HTTP server returns 200
4. Points the WebView at localhost

Some gotchas we hit: zombie processes on force-quit (solved with process groups on Unix, Job Objects on Windows), macOS GUI apps having an empty PATH (Homebrew doesn't exist from inside a Tauri app), and NEXT_PUBLIC_ env vars being baked at build time.

We also run 8 AI coding agents simultaneously on the same codebase, coordinated through beads.

brew tap beadbox/cask && brew install --cask beadbox