A tiny digital signage stack for places where you can't install software as admin. Three pieces:
- catstage — fullscreen viewer (Tauri / WebView2). Drop the EXE on a machine, point it at a broker, walk away.
- catsocks — dumb WebSocket relay. Runs on Cloudflare Workers' free tier. Sees only opaque ciphertext.
- catc — the CLI. Drives one or many stages from your laptop.
- catproxy — optional same-origin rewriting proxy (Cloudflare Worker) for
pages whose sub-resources get lost behind per-domain authenticating corporate
proxies. See workers/catproxy, including
what to do when a kiosk lands on the corporate proxy's login page and
how
catc traceshows where a stage really is.
End-to-end encrypted. No accounts, no master server, no telemetry. Stage state survives reboots and broker outages.
Early. v1 targets Windows x64 only — macOS / Linux / ARM distribution
may follow. The first install of a stage is a manual EXE drop; after
that catc stage update pushes a release to running stages: each one
downloads the asset (through catproxy's /b64/ route as text, so a
content-sniffing corporate proxy never sees an executable), verifies the
SHA-256 and an Ed25519 release signature, swaps the binary in beside
itself, relaunches with its own arguments and keeps the previous binary
as .old for one generation. For kiosks whose proxy blocks the download
outright, catc stage update --stream pushes the verified binary over
the encrypted broker instead. catc self-update updates the CLI the same
way. Nothing updates on its own — there is no periodic check, by design.
WSL/Linux is the recommended dev path.
# 1. Deploy the broker (once per deployment)
cd crates/catsocks && wrangler deploy
# -> wss://catsocks.<your-acct>.workers.dev/r/<your-room>
# 2. On each stage machine
catstage.exe --install-autostart --socks wss://.../r/<room> --name kitchen --screen 2
# Optional: --screen is 1-based. If unavailable, catstage falls back to primary monitor.
# --socks is remembered: later starts can be plain `catstage.exe`.
# 3. On your laptop
catc init --socks wss://.../r/<room>
catc stage add kitchen # the name shows on the stage's catcast://about page
catc config import config.yaml --name kitchen
catc nav https://example.com --for 5mSee examples/ for config.yaml, aliases.yaml, and a default Rhai logic.
0BSD. Use it. Fork it. Strip the credits. Sell it. Whatever.
Yes please. See CONTRIBUTING.md. No CLA, no DCO, no gatekeeping. Send a patch, an issue, or a sketch on a napkin.