The unpacked Hermes.exe showed the stock Electron icon + name in the
taskbar because build.win.signAndEditExecutable=false disables BOTH
electron-builder's signing AND its rcedit metadata/icon stamping. That
flag is load-bearing: enabling it re-triggers signtool -> winCodeSign,
whose macOS symlinks crash 7-Zip on non-admin Windows (unfixable dead end).
Decouple identity-stamping from signing entirely: after npm run pack,
run rcedit ourselves on the produced exe.
- Add rcedit as a direct devDependency of apps/desktop (the transitive
electron-winstaller copy is fragile).
- apps/desktop/scripts/set-exe-identity.cjs: Node helper that calls
rcedit's named export to set icon + ProductName/FileDescription/
CompanyName. Node builds argv natively — avoids the PowerShell->exe
->JSON double-escaping that broke the app-builder rcedit path.
- install.ps1 Set-DesktopExeIdentity invokes the script after the build,
before shortcuts. Best-effort: failure keeps the stock icon, never
fails the install. rcedit is a pure PE editor — no signtool, no
winCodeSign, no symlinks.
Verified locally: stamping a copy of the built Hermes.exe embeds the
32x32 icon and sets ProductName=Hermes.
Also fix update-path success-screen flash: in update mode the installer
hands off + exits in ~600ms, so don't route to the 'launch Hermes'
success view (it flashed before the window closed).
The install is a detached-HEAD checkout of a pinned commit. Without
--branch, 'hermes update' fell back to its default (main) and switched
the checkout to main — a divergent branch that lacks the desktop CLI
command — so the update targeted the wrong branch and the rebuild stage
failed with 'invalid choice: desktop'.
Thread BUILD_PIN_BRANCH (the branch this installer was built against,
and the same branch the desktop detected the update on) into
'hermes update --branch <b>' so update + rebuild stay on-branch.
Converge update on the same principle as bootstrap: one driver owns all
repo mutation. The desktop becomes a pure consumer that hands off to
Hermes-Setup.exe --update instead of re-implementing git/pip in Electron.
- hermes desktop --build-only: build without launching, so the installer
owns the post-update launch (CLI keeps build logic single-sourced).
- Installer AppMode {Install,Update} from argv; get_mode exposed to the UI.
- Installer self-copies to HERMES_HOME/hermes-setup.exe on install success
(no-op guard during --update re-invocation to avoid the locked-exe copy).
- Installer --update flow (update.rs): wait for the desktop to release the
venv shim, run 'hermes update --yes --gateway' (branch on exit 0/2/other),
then 'hermes desktop --build-only', then launch the rebuilt desktop. Reuses
the bootstrap event channel + progress UI via a synthetic two-stage manifest.
- Desktop applyUpdates() gutted (~105 lines of git/stash/pull/pyproject/pip
removed) -> thin handoff: spawn updater, app.quit() to free the shim.
Detection (checkUpdates, commit changelog, behind-count) kept intact.
- install.ps1 creates Start Menu + Desktop shortcuts to the packed Hermes.exe
(never bare 'hermes desktop', which would rebuild every launch).
Diagnosing the second VM failure was impossible because bootstrap-installer.log
contained only the 'starting' banner. Two causes:
1. emit_log() inside run_bootstrap() was tracing::debug! — dropped on the
floor under the default INFO env-filter.
2. The per-stage sink callbacks (on_stdout_line / on_stderr_line) only
emitted Tauri events to the frontend; they never tee'd to the log file
at all. When the failure route mounts, the Tauri event stream is the
only place the script output lived, and it gets discarded.
3. The Failed / Stage / Manifest / Complete lifecycle frames in emit_event()
were also Tauri-only — so even the 'which stage failed' frame never
reached the log.
Fixes:
* emit_log() → tracing::info!
* Sink callbacks tee stdout to info!, stderr to warn!, with stage label
as a structured field for grep'ability
* emit_event() now matches on the variant and logs each lifecycle frame
at the right level: Failed → tracing::error!, others → info!
Result: a failing install leaves a complete forensic trail in
bootstrap-installer.log — manifest stage list, every install.ps1
stdout/stderr line tagged by stage, the stage transitions, and the
final error. Same path as before so nothing the user does changes.
Three bugs found in the first VM end-to-end test:
1. install.ps1 -Manifest was called WITHOUT -IncludeDesktop, so the
manifest came back with the 14-stage list (no desktop stage), the
UI showed '14 steps' and Stage-Desktop never ran. Pass the flag to
both the manifest fetch and the per-stage runs — install.ps1 gates
the desktop stage's inclusion on the flag.
2. The Success screen's Launch button silently swallowed the Tauri
error when no Hermes.exe existed (e.g. Stage-Desktop was skipped).
Wire the error through to inline UI with an alert callout, so the
user gets actionable text ('Hermes.exe missing, run hermes desktop
from a terminal') instead of an unresponsive button.
3. The Success screen tells users to run 'hermes desktop' from a
terminal but the CLI only accepted 'hermes gui' — invalid choice
for 'desktop'. Rename the subcommand canonically to 'desktop' with
'gui' as a backwards-compatible alias. Update the _SUBCOMMANDS sets
used by session-flag arg parsing + logging-mode probe so both names
route to the same logic.
Hermes-Setup.exe is a small signed Rust+Tauri binary that drives
scripts/install.ps1 stage-by-stage with a native UI matching the
desktop's design language. Replaces the chicken-and-egg pattern of
shipping a 200MB Electron app whose first launch existed only to
run install.ps1.
The architecture:
Rust backend (src-tauri/):
bootstrap.rs orchestrator -- Tauri commands, stage iteration
install_script.rs resolve install.ps1 (dev checkout, cache, GitHub raw)
powershell.rs spawn powershell, line-stream stdout/stderr, parse JSON
events.rs BootstrapEvent types -- mirror bootstrap-runner.cjs
paths.rs HERMES_HOME resolution + tracing log setup
build.rs bakes BUILD_PIN_COMMIT / BUILD_PIN_BRANCH from
'git rev-parse HEAD' at compile time
React frontend (src/):
Tauri webview rendering 4 screens (welcome / progress / success /
failure), driven by nanostores subscribing to the Rust event stream.
Visual layer reuses the desktop's styles.css wholesale via @import
so the installer and desktop never drift visually.
Distribution:
targets = ['app', 'dmg', 'appimage'] -- no NSIS/MSI wrapper. The
raw target/release/Hermes-Setup.exe IS the artifact on Windows;
.dmg + .app on macOS; AppImage on Linux. One file, double-click,
no installer-installing-an-installer pattern.
Compile-time pinning:
build.rs reads 'git rev-parse HEAD' and emits
cargo:rustc-env=BUILD_PIN_COMMIT=<sha> + BUILD_PIN_BRANCH=<branch>.
bootstrap.rs's option_env!() picks these up so the binary fetches
install.ps1 from the exact SHA it was tested against. CI / release
builds can override via HERMES_BUILD_PIN_COMMIT env var.
Windows manifest:
hermes-setup.manifest declares level='asInvoker' so the
productName 'Hermes Setup' doesn't trip Windows's installer-
detection heuristic and refuse to launch without elevation.
Also declares PerMonitorV2 DPI + UTF-8 active code page + Common
Controls v6.
Limitations of this initial version:
* No code signing -- Windows SmartScreen will warn once on Hermes-Setup.exe
('More info -> Run anyway'). The downstream binaries it produces
(Hermes.exe in win-unpacked/, the hermes CLI) are locally-built and
therefore don't carry MOTW, so they launch without SmartScreen
intervention. Cert procurement tracked separately.
* macOS and Linux build paths defined but untested -- Windows-only V1.
