dsh-download-files

@louisremi/dsh-always-on

A DeepSeek Harness plugin for running your Harness in a container, where it has no access to your local file system.

Run the Harness in a Docker container — on a NAS, a server, anywhere — and it lives on a machine of its own: the stock "show file location" and "Open in app" buttons would have to reach a desktop that isn't there, and nothing inside the container can read or write your computer's files. Your browser is the only connection between you and your files. This plugin makes it enough, replacing the dead buttons with things that work through it:

• Download file buttons that save a file to your computer.
• Show files, which opens the sidebar file explorer.
• Edit, which opens a text file in an in-sidebar code editor (Monaco, the editor behind VS Code) and saves it back to the Harness host.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add @louisremi/dsh-always-on

Use the name of the profile your Harness runs with. The plugin loads live; restart the Harness only if the command says a restart is required.

Installing from a git URL builds the plugin on install (prepare runs npm run build). If your profile is managed by pnpm it may block build scripts until you approve them (allowBuilds); a skipped build leaves the plugin without its dist/.

Usage

Nothing to configure.

Download. The download button appears wherever the folder button used to be: file cards under an agent reply (present) and in the changed-files review tab, the toolbar of a file open in the sidebar preview, and the empty state of a file the preview can't render.

Show files. The workspace folder button in the session header becomes a single Show files button. It opens (or focuses) the sidebar's Files tab. Inside that tab the button is hidden, since it would do nothing.

Edit. Open a text file in the sidebar preview and press Edit (pencil icon, next to Download). The file opens in its own editor tab:

• Ctrl/Cmd+S or the Save button writes the file; a dot on the tab and filename marks unsaved changes.
• If the file changed on disk after you opened it, saving is refused and you choose Reload from disk, Overwrite, or Keep editing. Nothing is overwritten silently.
• Closing a tab (or the browser page) with unsaved changes asks for confirmation.
• Line endings (LF/CRLF) and a leading UTF-8 byte-order mark are preserved.
• Text files up to 1 MiB. Binary files and invalid UTF-8 are refused, not corrupted.
• Saving follows the session's sandbox mode: it fails in read-only mode and outside the workspace in workspace-write mode, exactly like the agent's own file tools.

How it works

The plugin adds two authenticated routes to the Harness, GET /api/download.file and POST /api/save.file, and registers its buttons in the same UI slots as the stock ones, shadowing them (disable the plugin and the stock buttons return). "Show files" calls the sidebar's public openTab('files'); the editor is a sidebar tab type registered through the public sidebar API. Downloads stream straight to disk, so large files are fine. Saves go through the Harness's own filesystem layer with the session's sandbox policy and a version check.

The editor and the CDN

To keep the package small (~69 kB), Monaco is not bundled. On the first Edit it is loaded from jsDelivr at a pinned version (monaco-editor@0.52.2).

• It runs in a sandboxed iframe (sandbox="allow-scripts", no allow-same-origin) with a Content-Security-Policy that only permits the CDN. The CDN's code therefore cannot read the Harness page, your session cookie, local storage, or call the Harness API; it only exchanges messages with the editor wrapper.
• The loader script is checked with Subresource Integrity (SRI). Files the loader then pulls in are not individually pinned by hash, which is why the isolation above matters.
• Your browser needs internet access to `cdn.jsdelivr.net` (the Harness host does not). If it is unreachable or blocked, the editor falls back to a plain `` with the same save, conflict and dirty-state behaviour, and says so.
• jsDelivr sees your IP address and user agent when Monaco loads.

Limitations

• Download: single files only; folders are not downloadable.
• Edit: text files up to 1 MiB; no multi-user locking beyond the on-disk version check.
• Tested with DSH 0.2.0-rc.2. It depends on the stock open-in-app and sidebar-right plugins' slot names and public API.

Development

The source is TypeScript; npm run build compiles it to dist/ (it also runs automatically via prepare on install and pack). The tests run .ts files directly through Node's native type stripping, so developing needs Node ≥ 22.18 (or ≥ 23.6) — the plugin itself still only requires Node ≥ 20 at runtime.

npm ci
npm run check      # TypeScript typecheck of src, tests and e2e
npm run build      # compile src/ to dist/
npm test           # host route unit tests (no browser needed)
npm run test:e2e   # opt-in: real headless Chromium + real Monaco from the CDN (builds first)

test:e2e needs Chromium, playwright-core and React 18 UMD builds; see the header of e2e/browser.e2e.mts.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile web remove @louisremi/dsh-always-on

Releasing

Changes land on main as pull requests, so each GitHub Release can describe itself: create a release with an empty description and the Release notes workflow fills it from everything merged since the previous release (.github/release.yml controls the categorization).

1. Bump version in package.json and push (via PR).
2. Publish a GitHub Release whose tag matches the version: gh release create vX.Y.Z.
3. The Publish to npm workflow then runs on release publish: it checks the tag against package.json, lints, type-checks, tests, and publishes to npm with provenance through trusted publishing — no tokens stored in the repo. If the version is already in the registry (the very first publish of a package has to be done manually, since trusted publishing is configured on the package page), the workflow skips the publish.

License

MIT