Installation

LocalCan 3.0 (Beta) ships as a desktop app with a bundled daemon on macOS and Windows, and as a CLI-only build on Linux.

✨Coming from LocalCan 2.x?
Installing 3.0 doesn't touch your 2.x data — both versions can run side-by-side and you keep 2.x as a fallback any time. On first launch 3.0 asks what to bring over. The default ("license only") is reversible and recommended during the beta. The one decision that can't be undone is migrating a Public URL — once it runs on 3.0's new infrastructure it stops working in 2.x, which matters most for Public URLs on custom domains since those can't be recreated from scratch.

macOS

Download the .dmg from localcan.com/download↗.
Drag LocalCan into your Applications folder and open it.
The daemon is bundled inside the app — there is nothing else to install.

The first time you open the app, LocalCan asks whether you want to install the localcan command line tools. You can also enable them later from Settings → Command Line Tools.

Windows

Download the .exe installer from localcan.com/download↗.
Run it. If Windows Defender shows a SmartScreen warning, click More info → Run anyway to proceed.
Install Bonjour Print Services — .local domains rely on it to resolve. You can grab it from Apple's download page↗.

The first time you open the app, LocalCan asks whether you want to install the localcan command line tools. You can also enable them later from Settings → Command Line Tools. Open a new terminal afterwards — localcan version should print the installed version.

Linux

Linux is CLI-only — there is no desktop UI. Install the beta CLI with:

Shell

curl -fsSL https://localcan.com/install-beta.sh | sh

The script downloads the right binary for your architecture and places it on your PATH. Updates are handled by localcan update (the desktop app has its own auto-updater, the standalone CLI does not).

A few things behave differently on Linux:

No Bonjour/mDNS publishing. .local domains will not resolve automatically on the same machine the way they do on macOS and Windows. Use a real DNS entry, an /etc/hosts line, or a Public URL instead.
No traffic inspector UI. The daemon still records traffic via the inspector, but there is no built-in viewer today.
No system tray. The daemon runs as a background process. Manage it with localcan start --detach, localcan stop, and localcan status.

Next steps

New to LocalCan? Follow the Quick start.
Prefer the terminal? Jump to the CLI quick start.