Ship Studio

The professional studio for modern development. Build it, ship it, host it — without leaving the app.

Ship Studio is a free desktop app that puts everything you need for agentic development in one window: an AI agent terminal, a live preview, visual editing, Git branches and PRs, and one-click deploys. Plug in the agent and accounts you already pay for — Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode; GitHub; Vercel — and start shipping.

The web is changing, and freelancers, agencies, and designers are trying to stay up to speed. Ship Studio is the easiest path to modern development: all the simplicity of the all-in-one tools you're used to, without the lock-in. It's a real desktop app that runs locally on your Mac — your code lives on your machine, not on our servers.

Dev tools for the rest of us.

Download for free · Website · Community Slack · Follow @galluzzo_julian · YouTube

Why Ship Studio

• Truly free. No account, no Ship Studio subscription on top. Bring the agent and hosting accounts you already have.
• No lock-in. It's your repo, your machine, your hosting. Stop using Ship Studio tomorrow and you keep everything.
• One window. Agent, preview, branches, deploys — no tab-juggling between a terminal, an editor, GitHub, and a hosting dashboard.

What you get

• AI Agent Terminal — Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode built in, with multi-tab and side-by-side agent panes.
• Live Preview — Real-time preview with responsive breakpoints, zoom, fullscreen mode, and a locale switcher for multilingual projects.
• Visual Editing — Select an element, change it, write custom CSS — without burning AI credits. Pinnable editor panel and a Webflow-style element tree in fullscreen.
• Mobile App Preview — Build and mirror Expo, React Native, and Flutter apps on the iOS simulator, right in the workspace.
• GitHub Integration — One-click repo creation, publishing, PR submission with AI-generated titles/descriptions, and a merge-conflict resolution UI.
• Deploys — Push to staging or production on Vercel with one click; auto-deploys on every push.
• Projects Dashboard — Visual cards and a dense list view with bulk selection, automatic screenshot thumbnails, folders, pinned hot sessions, and multi-window support.
• Snapshots & Backups — Create and restore project snapshots when an agent goes off the rails.
• Command Palette — Cmd+K for every action in the app.
• Starter Templates — Next.js, SvelteKit, Astro, Nuxt, plain HTML/CSS/JS — plus Expo, React Native, and Flutter mobile starters.
• Plugins, Skills & MCP — Extend the app with plugins, install agent skills, and configure MCP servers.
• Env Editor, IDE Launcher, Monorepo Support, Auto-Updates — the unglamorous stuff, handled.

Install

Grab the latest release from ship-studio/releases:

Launch the app and the onboarding wizard takes it from there — it installs the system prerequisites (Node, Git, GitHub CLI, an AI agent CLI) for you. See docs/INSTALLATION.md for the full guide.

Official builds auto-update: the app checks on launch and hourly, then applies updates with one click. Recent changes live in RELEASE_NOTES.md.

Build from source

Prerequisites: Node 22 (see .nvmrc), pnpm, Rust stable, and on macOS the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).

git clone https://github.com/ship-studio/ship-studio.git
cd ship-studio
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # run in development mode
pnpm tauri build    # production build → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

How it's built

ship-studio/
├── src/                      # React frontend
│   ├── components/           # UI components (incl. setup/, edit/, primitives/)
│   ├── lib/                  # Tauri command wrappers & utilities
│   ├── hooks/                # Custom React hooks
│   ├── commands/             # Cmd+K palette registry
│   ├── contexts/             # Modal, toast, and other app contexts
│   └── styles/               # CSS (global tokens, features, modes)
├── src-tauri/                # Rust backend
│   └── src/commands/         # Tauri commands by domain:
│                             #   git/ projects/ setup/ pty/ plugins/ skills/
│                             #   health/ ide/ + mobile, edit, publishing,
│                             #   github, conflicts, snapshots, i18n, …
├── docs/                     # Contributor & forking docs
└── packages/plugin-sdk/      # Plugin SDK

The backend exposes its functionality as Tauri commands registered in src-tauri/src/lib.rs; the frontend calls them through typed wrappers in src/lib/. For the full architecture tour, read CLAUDE.md — it's the same guide AI agents use to work on this codebase.

Contributing

We'd love your help — and we've tried to make it absurdly easy for both humans and AI agents to contribute:

1. Read CONTRIBUTING.md — setup, CI gates, and the PR process.
2. Skim docs/CONTRIBUTING_PATTERNS.md — the shared primitives (<ModalFrame>, <Button>, useInvoke, design tokens, CommandError) that keep the codebase consistent.
3. Working with an AI agent? It will pick up CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md automatically and follow the house patterns.

Before pushing, run the same gates CI runs:

pnpm check:all && pnpm test:run && pnpm rust:test

Want to fork and ship your own distribution instead? See docs/FORKING.md.

Privacy & telemetry

Official builds send anonymous usage events to the maintainers' PostHog project and crash reports to Sentry. Every event is documented in docs/analytics.md.

Disable analytics any time from inside the app (Settings → Usage analytics) — the setting persists and the Rust backend short-circuits all sends, crash reports included. Building your own distribution? See docs/FORKING.md → Telemetry to swap in your own keys or strip telemetry entirely.

Security

Found a vulnerability? Do not file a public issue. See SECURITY.md for private reporting.

Sponsors

Ship Studio is free and open source. These are the people covering the bills and putting in the hours to keep it that way.

Native — Web & product agency

Native is the web and product team for companies who value speed and quality above all else. One team covering strategy, design, and development.

Native funds Ship Studio's running costs and contributes development hours to the app itself. It's also part-owned by Ship Studio's founders, so when you hire Native for a project, you're directly supporting this one too.

• Need a website or product? Work with Native ↗
• Agency or freelancer? Native teams up on projects too — reach out ↗

Support Ship Studio

Want to support the project with contributions or financially? Reach out — [email protected].

Community

• GitHub Discussions — questions, ideas, show-and-tell
• Community Slack — real-time chat with maintainers and users
• Issues — bug reports and feature requests
• @galluzzo_julian — follow along on X
• YouTube — tutorials, demos, and walkthroughs

License

MIT © Julian Galluzzo and Ship Studio contributors.