dsh-desktop-quick-actions

dsh-desktop-quick-actions

Two round buttons at the foot of the DSH desktop sidebar:

• Restart — closes the app and starts it again, without a console window ever appearing.
• Top up — opens the DeepSeek top-up page in your system browser.

Windows only (the restart helper leans on WMI). The top-up button works anywhere the desktop app runs.

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Why another restart button

The obvious version of this plugin is four lines: spawn('taskkill', ...) then spawn(exe). It fails in a way that is hard to guess from the code.

A console-subsystem child created through WMI gets a console of its own. On Windows 11 the system hands every new console to Windows Terminal, which is a separate process that ignores SW_HIDE and -WindowStyle Hidden. So:

1. A black terminal window appears.
2. You close it, because why would you keep it.
3. Closing it sends CTRL_CLOSE_EVENT to everything attached to that console — including the app that was started as its child.

The app dies a few seconds after it came back. Nothing in the log says why, because nothing crashed: the window manager did exactly what it was told.

Measured on Windows 11 with DSH desktop 0.2.1-rc series. Before the fix: every restart painted a WindowsTerminal.exe window. After: Get-Process WindowsTerminal returns nothing, and the relaunch log shows the whole path.

What the fix does

Two layers, because one is not enough:

Layer	Mechanism	Why
Launcher	Invoke-CimMethod Win32_Process Create → wscript.exe running a generated .vbs with WScript.Shell.Run cmd, 0, False	wscript.exe is a GUI-subsystem program: it never allocates a console to begin with. No console, nothing for Terminal to take over.
App start	Invoke-CimMethod Win32_Process Create for the app itself	The new process is owned by WmiPrvSE.exe and inherits no console, so no later window closing can reach it.

Start-Process remains as a fallback if WMI is unavailable.

The port is read, never assumed

The desktop host binds a fresh port on every launch. A hardcoded port number is wrong by the second restart. The host half reads req.headers.host — the request that triggered the restart already knows the port — and passes it to the helper as -Port. When it cannot be determined, the helper skips the port checks and waits on the process instead.

Install

dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-desktop-quick-actions

Restart the app once by hand. After that, the button works.

Routes

Method	Path	Purpose
GET	/dsh-quick-actions/info	Diagnostics: app pid, exe path, helper present, top-up URL, detected port, platform
POST	/dsh-quick-actions/restart	Start the detached helper
POST	/dsh-quick-actions/open	Open an https:// URL in the default browser
POST	/dsh-quick-actions/rendered	Client reports where it painted (layout probe)

/open accepts only https:// — no file:, no javascript:, no bare paths.

Safety

• The helper reads the target pid's ExecutablePath first and aborts if it does not match the executable it is about to start. It never kills a process that merely inherited the pid.
• The original command line is preserved, so custom flags such as --user-data-dir survive a restart.
• NODE_OPTIONS is stripped from the child environment so the relaunched app does not inherit an injected loader.
• Every step appends to ~/.dsh/desktop-quick-actions.log. If a restart fails, that file says which step refused and why.

Verify a restart

# after clicking the button
Get-Content "$env:USERPROFILE\.dsh\desktop-quick-actions.log" -Tail 20
Get-Process WindowsTerminal -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue   # expect no output

A healthy run looks like:

relaunch: helper start: pid=41828 exe=<install>\DeepSeek Harness.exe port=54264
relaunch: stopping app process
relaunch: starting app via WMI: "<install>\DeepSeek Harness.exe" ...
relaunch: wmi start ok: new pid=39380
relaunch: app is up again; done

Compatibility

• DSH desktop 0.2.1-rc.* and later. Needs the webServer service, which the desktop host provides; in a plain dsh web profile the routes are skipped and the plugin logs why.
• Windows 10/11 for the restart half. Node 20+.
• Nothing throws at import time — a failed loader entry makes the desktop app show its recovery dialog, so every step is guarded and logged.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile desktop remove dsh-desktop-quick-actions

License

MIT.