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Overview

The Allternit Platform Launcher is a single-binary distribution of the Allternit platform. It embeds the Rust allternit-api binary and the static UI assets from surfaces/ai.allternit.com, then self-extracts to the user’s cache directory on first run. This gives users a true double-clickable executable that starts both the API server and the local UI. The launcher lives in cmd/launcher and is published as allternit-platform-launcher.

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Why a standalone launcher?

  • include_bytes! and include_dir! require the embedded artifacts to exist at compile time.
  • Keeping the launcher crate outside the root workspace lets cargo check --workspace pass without requiring every developer to build the full UI and API binary first.
  • Users get one file that starts the complete platform locally.

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Embed pipeline

The launcher embeds two artifacts:
  1. embed/allternit-api — the compiled allternit-api release binary.
  2. embed/ui — the built static UI assets.

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Build the artifacts

This script:
  • Builds allternit-api in release mode.
  • Builds the UI with pnpm install && pnpm build.
  • Copies both artifacts into cmd/launcher/embed/.

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Build the launcher

The resulting binary is at target/release/allternit-platform-launcher.

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Runtime behavior

On first run, the launcher:
  1. Creates a persistent cache directory (for example, ~/.cache/allternit-platform on macOS).
  2. Extracts the API binary and UI assets to the cache directory.
  3. Starts the API server on 127.0.0.1:3010.
  4. Starts a minimal static-file UI server on 127.0.0.1:3456.
  5. Opens the user’s browser to the UI.
On subsequent runs, the launcher reuses the cached extraction if the binary size matches the embedded artifact.

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Default ports

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Environment variables

The launcher sets the following environment variables for the API child process:

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Stopping the launcher

Press Ctrl+C in the terminal. The launcher sends SIGTERM to the API child process and exits cleanly. The cache directory is intentionally not deleted so the next startup is faster.

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Logs and troubleshooting

The API process writes logs to stdout/stderr, which the launcher pipes through. Check the terminal output for startup errors. Common issues: