johunsang/tauri-dev-screen-cli

This is a small Node.js command-line program for inspecting and poking at a running Tauri desktop application during development. Tauri is a framework for building desktop apps that wrap a web page inside a native window, similar to Electron but lighter. When such an app is under development, looking at the actual native window from outside the app is awkward, because browser test tools cannot reach into it. This CLI fills that gap. It works by connecting to a WebSocket exposed by a separate Rust crate called tauri-plugin-mcp-bridge, which the developer adds to their Tauri project. The bridge usually listens on local port 9223. Once it is running, the CLI can take a PNG screenshot of the actual rendered window, save a compact text snapshot of the page's DOM, run arbitrary JavaScript inside the WebView, click a CSS selector, type into an input, fire a keyboard event, or resize the window. The README frames the audience as AI coding agents and CI pipelines that need proof a desktop app actually renders and behaves. An agent can call tauri-dev-screen status to confirm the window is up, tauri-dev-screen screenshot to capture an image, tauri-dev-screen snapshot to dump the DOM as readable text, and tauri-dev-screen js to ask a question like how many buttons are on screen. The artifacts can then be attached to a pull request check or stored as a local bug report. A running default check command, used with no subcommand, drops four files into a .tauri-dev-screen folder: status.json with app and window metadata, screenshot.png, dom-snapshot.txt, and a summary.json. Commands accept flags for host, port, window name, output folder, file path, and timeout, and the same values can be set with environment variables like TAURI_DEV_HOST and TAURI_DEV_PORT. The selling point is that this is just a CLI. There is no MCP stdio server to register, no editor integration to set up, and no extra runtime to keep alive. Any shell script or CI job can drive it. Installation is a single npm install -g from the GitHub source, or npm link from a clone. The README adds an explicit security caution: the bridge can run arbitrary JavaScript inside the WebView, so it should only be pointed at a trusted local development app and never exposed to untrusted networks.