intent-hq/intent

**Intent** is a desktop application for coordinating coding agents at scale.
Manage workspaces, notes, tasks, coding agents, git, and terminals in one place.
The app bundles and manages its Rust backend daemon (intentd) for you.
Install
**Download the latest packaged app from intentapp.dev.**
This is the recommended way to use Intent; no separate intentd installation
is needed.
For all other versions, visit the
cloudlands-releases release page.
Standalone daemon (advanced)
Install intentd separately only if you want to run and manage the daemon
independently of the desktop app, such as on a remote host.
Installing intentd installs the **sitter** — a small self-updating shim,
itself named intentd, that downloads the latest real daemon from the public
intent-hq/intentd-releases
mirror (falling back to the
intentd repo's own releases),
forwards all CLI
arguments to it, and respawns it if it crashes.
Update checks run only for intentd serve (at startup and every 12–24
hours); one-shot subcommands (e.g. intentd doctor) run the installed
daemon as-is and fail fast with guidance if none is installed yet. The
sitter tracks the stable channel by default; intentd sitter channel beta
durably pins beta in /sitter/config.toml (add --redownload to
install that channel's version immediately — also the downgrade path — then
intentd restart to activate it in place). Per-launch --sitter-channel /
INTENTD_CHANNEL overrides take precedence over the pin.
One-line script (macOS & Linux)
Detects OS/arch, verifies the archive checksum, and installs intentd to
/usr/local/bin when writable, else ~/.local/bin (override with
INTENTD_INSTALL_DIR). Then start the daemon with intentd serve, or use
the Homebrew / .deb installs below for a managed background service.
On Windows:
Homebrew (macOS & Linux)
The Intent desktop app connects to an already-running daemon such as this
brew-managed one when configured to; it can also spawn its own bundled
intentd (sidecar mode).
Debian/Ubuntu
.deb packages ship the sitter with a systemd user unit that runs
intentd serve --resume-all; download them from the sitter releases on the
public
intentd-releases page:
Direct download
Prebuilt sitter archives for macOS, Linux, and Windows are published on the
public intentd-releases repo's
sitter-latest release.
Network ports and separate installations
Network access is disabled by default. Local-only installations use their local
socket and do not allocate a TCP port. On the first WSS start, an installation
without a configured server.wsApi.port tries 5181 and then consecutive ports
through 65535, advancing only when an address is already in use. It saves the
first port that binds on every required address in /config.toml
before announcing readiness. Separate per-user installations select and save
their own ports; clients should use intentd pair or the pairing payload to
discover the actual listening port.
The saved port stays fixed across restarts. Existing numeric port settings and
nonzero INTENTD_TCP_PORT overrides are also fixed choices. If enabled WSS
cannot bind at daemon startup, the daemon exits with an error; sitter retries
do not choose another port. Release the occupied port, or stop the daemon and
set a different port under [server.wsApi] in its config. Deliberately
removing that entry requests a new selection at the next WSS start. Check for
an environment override before editing the file, since it takes precedence.
Installer and sitter readiness checks remain based on the per-user local
socket; they do not allocate or probe a WSS port. See the
transport contract and
port setting semantics
for runtime enable failures and reset behavior.
Build from source