@vibecook/ghosttead

The prebuilt Ghosttea terminal daemon. Installing this package pulls the binary for the current platform through an os/cpu-gated optional dependency, and ghostteadPath() names it:

import { spawn } from "node:child_process";
import { ghostteadPath } from "@vibecook/ghosttead";

const daemon = spawn(ghostteadPath(), { env: daemonEnvironment });

The daemon is configured entirely through its environment (GHOSTTEA_CONTROL_SOCKET, GHOSTTEA_FRAME_SOCKET, GHOSTTEA_AUTH_TOKEN); the one argument it understands is --version. The binary's version is the package's version — both come from the same release tag.

Resolution order

1. GHOSTTEAD_BIN, when set. This is the same override every consumer of the daemon already honors, and pointing it at a locally built target/release/ghosttead is how development against an unreleased daemon works — including on platforms with no prebuild.
2. The platform package for ${process.platform}-${process.arch}: @vibecook/ghosttead-darwin-arm64 or @vibecook/ghosttead-win32-x64.

Prebuilds exist exactly for the targets Ghosttea's release gate builds and validates. On any other platform ghostteadPath() throws an error naming the supported targets and the GHOSTTEAD_BIN way out.

Bundlers

Resolution walks node_modules at runtime. An Electron main process that bundles its dependencies should keep this package external — the exports map carries a require condition, so a CommonJS bundle can require() it on Node 22.12+ — or call ghostteadPath() at build time and stage the binary beside the bundle, which a packaged application needs to do anyway.

The resolver also tolerates being inlined: when the direct walk finds nothing — the platform packages are dependencies of this package, and pnpm's layout makes them visible only from beside its real directory — it locates the installed @vibecook/ghosttead from the bundle's own position and resolves the platform package from there. When even that fails, the error names bundling as the cause instead of a missing package. External remains the recommendation; it keeps resolution on Node's own semantics.