deltachat-desktop

Delta Chat Desktop

Desktop Application for delta.chat

Editions

Electron :electron:	Browser 🦊🧭🏐
The default application. Based on Electron. Currently deployed in appstore and used by most users.	Highly experimental version with a webserver component and web-ui in the browser. At the moment only meant for developers and automated testing.
Project Folder Download Links	Project Folder Fediverse Thread Blog Post

There is a third, WIP edition based on Tauri instead of Electron. It lives in its own repository — deltachat-tauri — and consumes this repository’s frontend through a pinned upstream/ submodule. See Fediverse Thread and Delta Tauri - nlnet project.

Documentation Links

For Users

• Troubleshooting
• CLI flags
• Keybindings
• How to make custom Themes

For Developers

• Contribution Guidelines
• Logging
• Documentation for Developers
• Styling Guidelines
• How to update core
• How to do end to end testing
• How to do a release

Table of Contents

Install

The application can be downloaded from https://get.delta.chat. Here you’ll find binary releases for all supported platforms. See below for platform specific instructions. If you run into any problems please consult the Troubleshooting section below.

Linux

Flatpak

The primary distribution-independent way to install is to use the flatpak build. This is maintained in its own repository. However, a pre-built binary can be downloaded and installed from Flathub which also has a setup guide for many Linux platforms.

Arch Linux

Run pacman -S deltachat-desktop to install Delta Chat Desktop on Arch Linux.

Alternatively, build deltachat-desktop-git package from Arch User Repository.

WARNING: Currently the AUR package compiles from latest master. This can be more recent as the latest release, introduce new features but also new bugs.

If you have a AUR helper like yay or paru installed, you can install it by running yay -S deltachat-desktop-git and following the instruction in your terminal.

Otherwise you can still do it manually:

# Download the latest snapshot of the PKGBUILD
wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/deltachat-desktop-git.tar.gz

# extract the archive and rm the archive file afterwards
tar xzfv deltachat-desktop-git.tar.gz && rm deltachat-desktop-git.tar.gz

# cd into extracted folder
cd deltachat-desktop-git

# build package
makepkg -si

# install package (you need to replace <version> with whatever version makepkg built)
sudo pacman -U deltachat-desktop-git-<version>.tar.xz

Mac OS

Homebrew

$ brew install --cask deltachat

DMG

Simply install the .dmg file as you do it with all other software on Mac.

Windows

You can find the downloads for windows on https://get.delta.chat. However, we recommend using the release from Microsoft Store, because there you get automatic updates.

From Source

⚠ This is mostly for development purposes, this won’t install/integrate Delta Chat into your system. So unless you know what you are doing, we recommend to stick to the methods above if possible.

# Get the code
$ git clone https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-desktop.git
$ cd deltachat-desktop

# Install pnpm
$ npm i -g pnpm

# Install dependencies
$ pnpm install

# Build the app (only needed on the first time or if the code was changed)
$ pnpm -w build:electron

# Start the application:
$ pnpm -w start:electron

-w means workspace root package, with this you don’t need to have your current working directory at the repo-root to run those scripts.

For development with local deltachat core read docs/UPDATE_CORE.md.

Troubleshooting

• This module builds on top of deltachat core, which in turn has external dependencies. The instructions below assume a Linux system (e.g. Ubuntu 18.10).
• Read the error, maybe it already tells you what you need to do. If not feel free to file an issue in this github repo.
• Make sure that your nodejs version is 22.0.0 or newer.
• If you still get errors look at the instructions in docs/UPDATE_CORE.md to set things up or write an issue.

Configuration and Databases

The configuration files and database are stored at application-config’s default file paths.

Each database is a SQLite file that represents the account for a given email address.

How to Contribute

• Read docs/DEVELOPMENT.md
• For translations see our transifex page: https://www.transifex.com/delta-chat/public/
• For other ways to contribute: https://delta.chat/en/contribute

Logging

You can access the log folder and the current log file under the View->Developer menu:

For more details on how the logging system works, read docs/LOGGING.md.

License

Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE file for details.

Copyright © Delta Chat contributors.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.