A console that operates other machines

Connector is a native Qt 6 application that treats every computer on a Tailscale tailnet as an addressable system with a readiness state, a shell target, and a remote display. It pairs and streams with Moonlight in-process, drives Sunshine on the far end, and exposes the whole thing as a semantic RPC surface that a CLI, a daemon, or an LLM agent can operate.

• C++20 / Qt 6.4+
• QML cockpit
• Unix-socket RPC
• MCP server
• macOS client · Linux X11 host
• v0.1.0

Most remote-desktop tools stop at "here is a window into that machine." Connector's premise is that the window is the least interesting part. The interesting part is the state model underneath it — is this host online in the tailnet, is its host runtime answering, does this client hold a trust record, is there a working shell path — and the fact that those four answers are independent of each other.

That model is why the app ships three separate entry points instead of one. Connector.app is the visual cockpit. connectord is a headless control plane that keeps working when nobody is logged into a desktop. connector-mcp.py is the bridge that lets an agent drive either one. They all speak the same JSON-line protocol over the same style of local Unix socket.

Six executables come out of the build. They are deliberately not one binary: the daemon must survive with no desktop session, the stream helper must be a GUI process that can crash without taking the cockpit down, and the CLI must be small enough to drop on a box that only has Qt Core and Network.

The daemon wrapper resolves the socket path before it runs anything, so the same CLI binary can be pointed at the daemon or at the desktop app without recompiling.

$ scripts/ensure-connectord.py --print-socket
/run/user/1000/connector/daemon.sock

$ scripts/connectorctl-daemon.sh rpc app.ping
{
    "capabilities": [
        "devices.start_host",
        "ssh.exec",
        "connectorstream.launch"
    ],
    "control_protocol_version": 1,
    "mode": "daemon",
    "name": "Connector",
    "socket": "/run/user/1000/connector/daemon.sock",
    "version": "0.1.0"
}

$ scripts/connectorctl-daemon.sh ui tree
ui.tree requires the Connector desktop app or streaming session process.
The headless daemon only exposes device discovery, settings, and SSH control right now.

That last error is not a stub. ConnectorDaemonServer::desktopRequired() is a deliberate, explicit refusal for every ui.* method plus host.set_enabled, host.set_credentials, host.approve_pair, host.revoke_client and host.set_default_monitor — the operations that need a live QML tree or a local desktop session. The daemon would rather tell you where to go than half-answer.

"This is a high-trust local-owner automation surface. It is intended for the same user account that launched Connector."

Connector is not a from-scratch streaming stack and does not pretend to be. It vendors two mature GPLv3 projects and builds a control layer on top of them. The boundary is legible in the build system: four static libraries are compiled out of vendor/moonlight-qt and linked into the authored executables.

The Sunshine tree carries its own CONNECTOR_VENDOR_SOURCE.md recording the exact imported commit (dfb5163c3cbaed1c8052c6d0f9d6cca4c320f405) and noting that because it was vendored as plain files rather than a submodule, scripts/embed-sunshine-runtime.sh has to hydrate Sunshine's own third-party dependencies into the build directory before configuring it.