Downloads

Every way to get Bowire. Pick what fits your workflow.

Download

On your machine

Get the standalone workbench running — your platform’s package manager, a native installer, or a portable bundle you can unzip. Same build behind all of them.

Windows package managers

Install the standalone tool through the package manager you already use — no .NET tool chain on the host required.

winget

$ winget install KuestenLogik.Bowire

Published to the microsoft/winget-pkgs repository by the release workflow. Prefer the MSI or the .NET tool below if you don’t use winget.

Chocolatey

$ choco install bowire

Published to the Chocolatey community repository by the release workflow. Prefer the MSI or the .NET tool below if you don’t use Chocolatey.

.NET global tool — standalone CLI + UI

Install once, point at any running server. No code changes to your host app.

$ dotnet tool install -g Kuestenlogik.Bowire.Tool
$ bowire --url https://your-server

Native installers

MSI for Windows, DEB for Debian / Ubuntu, RPM for Fedora / RHEL / SUSE. For shops that prefer a platform-native install path over the .NET tool chain. Unsigned for now — SmartScreen / Gatekeeper may prompt on first run.

Self-contained / portable

Zip or tarball per platform with the .NET runtime bundled. Extract, run the bowire binary — no SDK, no installer, no registry entries, no system changes. Perfect for air-gapped networks, USB-stick installs, ephemeral CI runners, or anywhere you want an xcopy deployment.

GitHub Releases

Every tagged release is published with changelog, source archive, and all the self-contained bundles listed above. For air-gapped installs, reproducible builds, or when you want to compare release notes.

Browse all releases on GitHub

Once it’s installed

Bowire lands where your desktop already looks — the Start menu and a desktop icon on Windows, the application menu on Linux, Bowire.app on macOS, and bowire in any terminal. Clicking it starts the workbench and opens your browser at it; the browser tab is the interface.

It is not a service and does not start with your machine. After a reboot nothing is running — open it again the same way. Clicking again while it is already up does not start a second copy: Bowire notices the first one and points your browser at it.

How to start Bowire

In your editor

The workbench in a side panel, driving the same CLI your terminal and your CI already run.

VS Code Marketplace

The workbench in a side panel, driving the same CLI your terminal and CI run. It does not bundle Bowire — it uses one you already have, or offers to fetch one if it finds none.

$ ext install kuestenlogik.bowire-vscode
View on the Marketplace

See the VS Code guide for how the extension resolves a CLI and where your collections are stored. A JetBrains plugin is tracked separately.

Hosted as a container

Drop Bowire next to a non-.NET service as a sidecar — no .NET runtime on the host, one manifest to deploy.

Docker / container

Multi-arch OCI image (linux/amd64 + linux/arm64) published on every tagged release. Drop it next to a non-.NET service as a sidecar — no .NET runtime on the host, one docker run to deploy.

  • GitHub Container Registry

    ghcr.io/kuestenlogik/bowire:latest

    Primary registry. No login required for pulls, no rate limits for public packages, ties straight back to the source repo.

  • Docker Hub

    Mirror on Docker Hub. Identical image content, same tags. Useful when your tooling defaults to the Docker Hub namespace or your registry mirror only sees docker.io.

Available tags: latest (newest stable), <version> (e.g. 2.3.0) for pinning. Multi-arch manifest list — docker picks the right architecture automatically. 

docker run --rm -p 5080:5080 \
  kuestenlogik/bowire:latest \
  --url https://api.example.com

Then open http://localhost:5080 in your browser. See the container setup docs for plugin-volume mounts, MCP-adapter mode, and embedded-mode integration in your own image.

In your own application

Reference the packages to mount the workbench inside your own host, or to build a protocol plugin of your own.

NuGet packages

Every plugin ships as a standalone NuGet package so you install only what you need. All published by Küstenlogik on nuget.org. Plugins follow their own release cadence — see the plugin compatibility matrix for which plugin version goes with which Bowire host.

Need them all at once locally? Grab bowire-nugets.zip — every official Küstenlogik NuGet for this release in a single archive. Useful for air-gapped CI, offline installs, or seeding an internal feed.

Core

Protocol plugins

Third-party plugins

Bowire’s protocol system is open — anyone can ship a plugin against the IBowireProtocol interface and publish it to NuGet. Packages tagged bowire-plugin show up in the discovery feed below. These are community-maintained, not official Küstenlogik releases — audit the source before running them in production.

Browse community plugins on NuGet

Want to build one? See the custom protocol guide for the plugin lifecycle and discovery contract.

Build from source

Clone the repo, audit the code, fork it, embed it in commercial products.

Source code

Every protocol plugin, the host integration, the CLI — all published on GitHub. Apache 2.0, no strings attached.

Clone on GitHub

Documentation

The complete Bowire documentation, packaged for offline reading — a standalone HTML snapshot you can unzip anywhere and a single searchable PDF.

Standalone HTML offline-ready

Unzip, open index.html, browse offline. Same layout as the online docs, minus the marketing site chrome so every outbound link stays self-contained.

Download bowire-docs.zip

PDF single file

Every article in one PDF. Useful for printing, archiving a specific version, or searching the whole reference inside a single reader.

Download bowire-docs.pdf

Every download on this page points at the latest release. Older versions stay available: each tagged release on github.com/Kuestenlogik/Bowire/releases carries its own installers, portable bundles and documentation — bowire-<version> and bowire-docs-<version>.{zip,pdf}. Package managers and the Marketplace keep their own version history.