Session Desktop & Library

Library Fork

This is a fork of Session Desktop with an added build to produce a library to run the desktop headless. For use by the claws of the world. Used AI to help separate frontend from backend with minimal changes to the core desktop app portion. Most UI and app logic is already nicely decoupled but hit a few snags that took more changes to desktop app then I liked.

https://github.com/BonesGit/session-desktop-library
npm package: @bonesgit/session-desktop-library

TODO

• Still to many changes to the core desktop app code. To much coupling between frontend and backend code that needed tweaking to just get something working. Needs better architecture so I can touch less desktop app code.

Client Features

• Account management — generate mnemonic, create new account, restore from mnemonic, get Session ID
• 1:1 messaging — send text messages to any Session ID
• Receive messages — real-time async iterator stream (for await (const msg of client.messages()))
• Group chats (GroupV2) — create groups, send messages, add/remove members, promote to admin, leave groups
• Emoji reactions — react to any message with an emoji (1:1 and GroupV2)
• Conversation history — list all conversations, fetch message history with pagination
• Attachments — send files/images with messages; download and decrypt received attachments
• Quoted replies — send messages quoting a prior message
• Linked device sync — group creation pushes config to user's own swarm so other devices see it
• Typing Indicator - Can set whether or not the user is typing, to show the typing indicator. DMs only. No group support.
• Contact management — accept contact requests, block/unblock contacts (untested)
• Conversation updates — real-time async iterator stream for metadata changes (untested)
• Profile — set display name, set display image
• Disappearing messages — send with configurable expiry timer (untested)

SKILL.md
See API docs
SessionClient source

Desktop Project Updates

• New build:lib build target.
• New dist-lib output folder.
• New integration tests for the library.
• Electron API - Prevents bundling Electron in library builds. See ts/node/dbVacuumManager.ts, ts/node/sql.ts and ts/session/apis/seed_node_api/SeedNodeAPI.ts
• IPC / Attachment Path - Direct file access or parameter passing instead of IPC. Explicit paths instead of Electron app paths. ts/types/MessageAttachment.ts
• Worker compatibility: Support for both Node.js worker_threads and browser Web Workers. See ts/webworker/
• Many more I can't list here - needs refactoring

Summary

Session integrates directly with Oxen Service Nodes, which are a set of distributed, decentralized and Sybil resistant nodes. Service Nodes act as servers which store messages offline, and a set of nodes which allow for onion routing functionality obfuscating users IP Addresses. For a full understanding of how Session works, read the Session Whitepaper.

Want to Contribute? Found a Bug or Have a feature request?

Please search for any existing issues that describe your bug or feature request to avoid duplicate submissions.

Submissions can be made by making a pull request to our development branch.If you don't know where to start contributing please read Contributing.md and refer to issues tagged with the good-first-issue tag.

Supported platforms

Check Session's system requirements and what platforms are supported here.

Build instructions

Build instructions can be found in Contributing.md.

Translations

Want to help us translate Session into your language? You can do so at https://getsession.org/translate!

Verifying signatures

Step 1:

Add Jason's GPG key. Jason Rhinelander, a member of the Session Technology Foundation and is the current signer for all Session Desktop releases. His GPG key can be found on his GitHub and other sources.

wget https://github.com/jagerman.gpg
gpg --import jagerman.gpg

Step 2:

Get the signed hashes for this release. SESSION_VERSION needs to be updated for the release you want to verify.

export SESSION_VERSION=1.15.0
wget https://github.com/session-foundation/session-desktop/releases/download/v$SESSION_VERSION/signature.asc

Step 3:

Verify the signature of the hashes of the files.

gpg --verify signature.asc 2>&1 |grep "Good signature from"

The command above should print "Good signature from "Jason Rhinelander...". If it does, the hashes are valid but we still have to make the sure the signed hashes match the downloaded files.

Step 4:

Make sure the two commands below return the same hash for the file you are checking. If they do, file is valid.

sha256sum session-desktop-linux-amd64-$SESSION_VERSION.deb
grep .deb signature.asc

Apple Silicon

sha256sum releases/session-desktop-mac-arm64-$SESSION_VERSION.dmg
grep .dmg signature.asc

Intel

sha256sum releases/session-desktop-mac-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.dmg
grep .dmg signature.asc

PowerShell

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 session-desktop-win-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.exe  # checksum is uppercase but should otherwise match
Select-String -Pattern ".exe" signature.asc

Bash

sha256sum session-desktop-win-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.exe
grep .exe signature.asc

Debian repository

Please visit https://deb.oxen.io/

License

Copyright 2011 Whisper Systems

Copyright 2013-2017 Open Whisper Systems

Copyright 2019-2024 The Oxen Project

Copyright 2024-2025 Session Technology Foundation

Licensed under the GPLv3: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Attributions

The IP-to-country mapping data used in this project is provided by MaxMind GeoLite2.

This project uses the Lucide Icon Font, which is licensed under the ISC License.