Flowbit

Vibecoded project. This app was built almost entirely through AI-driven pair programming (spec-by-conversation, agent-written commits) rather than hand-crafted line by line. Expect the code to reflect that workflow: fast iteration, real-world bug fixes as they surfaced, and comments that call out the non-obvious platform quirks discovered along the way.

Flowbit is a small desktop app for downloading YouTube and Twitch videos (and audio) with a couple of niceties baked in:

• YouTube: single videos or full playlists, quality/codec picking (H.264/VP9/AV1, AAC/Opus), multi-language audio track selection, and clipping a video/audio to a start–end time range.
• Twitch: VODs and clips, including live streams (records as they air).
• Live log panel streaming yt-dlp/ffmpeg output as it happens.
• Automatic dependency management: yt-dlp, ffmpeg/ffprobe and a QuickJS runtime (for yt-dlp's JS challenge solving) are downloaded on first launch — nothing to install manually, no bundled binaries to keep in sync by hand.
• Auto-update for yt-dlp on every startup, so extractor breakage from YouTube's frequent changes gets patched without a Flowbit release.
• Automatic cookie fallback: if YouTube's anti-bot check blocks an anonymous request, Flowbit retries once using cookies from whichever browser is already installed on the machine — no configuration required.

Stack

• Frontend: React 19 + TypeScript, built with Vite.
• Backend: Rust, Tauri v2 for the native shell.
• Downloading: yt-dlp + ffmpeg, invoked as managed subprocesses.

Prerequisites

• Bun (package manager and script runner for the frontend)
• Rust (stable toolchain, via rustup)
• Platform build tools required by Tauri — see the Tauri prerequisites guide for your OS (e.g. WebView2 on Windows, GTK/WebKitGTK on Linux).

yt-dlp, ffmpeg/ffprobe and the QuickJS runtime are not build dependencies — Flowbit downloads them itself into the app's data directory the first time it runs.

Getting started

bun install

Run in development

bun run tauri dev

On Linux under Wayland, use the Wayland-specific dev script instead if the window doesn't render correctly under XWayland:

bun run tauri:wayland

Build a release bundle

bun run tauri build

This runs the frontend production build (tsc && vite build) and then compiles and packages the Tauri app for the host platform (AppImage/deb on Linux, MSI/NSIS on Windows, .app/dmg on macOS), per the bundle config in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json.

Helper scripts

Thin wrappers around the commands above, plus a few extras:

./dev.sh              # bun run tauri dev (add --wayland to force the Wayland GTK backend)
./build.sh             # release bundle; also installs the binary to /usr/local/bin/flowbit
                        # (--windows cross-builds, --debug, --no-install, --bundles deb,rpm)
./clean.sh              # remove dist/ and the Rust target/ (--all also drops node_modules)