Beam

Share photos, videos, and files without relying on cloud service providers. No accounts, no servers. Transfer directly between devices, encrypted end-to-end.

Beam is built on top of atman, which is a Rust library that implements core protocols for peer-to-peer networking and file transfer.

Beam is an open-source software available on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The iOS version is implemented in beam-ios as a native Swift app, and the Android version is implemented in beam-android. All desktop versions are implemented in this repo using Tauri.

Repo layout

beam/
├── src-tauri/                  Tauri Rust shell
├── src/                        React frontend used by Tauri
├── public/, package.json, …    Vite / pnpm scaffolding
└── Cargo.toml                  workspace, one member: src-tauri

Develop

# For Linux, install system dependencies first:
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev \
                 librsvg2-dev libssl-dev patchelf

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Release

Tauri can only build for the host OS, so each desktop installer must be produced on a matching machine.

All of the following distribution processes are automated as an workflow, which is triggered automatically when a new tag is pushed.

macOS

pnpm tauri build     # → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/{dmg,macos}/

Produces an unsigned .app and .dmg.

For distribution, the app must be signed and notarized. The following environment variables must be set before running pnpm tauri build. For details, see Tauri's macOS signing guide:

• Signing
  • APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY: Developer ID Application certificate ID
• Notarization
  • APPLE_API_ISSUER: Issuer ID of App Store Connect API key
  • APPLE_API_KEY: App Store Connect API key ID
  • APPLE_API_KEY_PATH: Path to App Store Connect API private key (in .p8 format)

Windows

pnpm tauri build      # → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/{msi,nsis}/

Produces .msi and .exe installers. Unsigned builds trigger SmartScreen; sign with signtool or set WINDOWS_CERTIFICATE / WINDOWS_CERTIFICATE_PASSWORD env vars — see Tauri's Windows signing guide.

Linux

System packages required first:

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev \
                 librsvg2-dev libssl-dev patchelf
pnpm tauri build      # → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/{deb,appimage,rpm}/