Documentation

Secure Desk has two halves. A Node.js server on a Linux host serves the technician portal, the public join page, the browser console and the WebSocket relay. A native Windows client runs on each supported machine. You install the first once; the second gets distributed to the machines you support.

Read this first: who is who

The naming is consistent across the product, the protocol and these docs, and getting it backwards will make everything else confusing.

• Client — the computer receiving support. It shares its screen and receives input.
• Agent — the support technician giving support. They view the screen and send mouse and keyboard.
• Relay — your server. It pairs an Agent and a Client and forwards bytes between them.

So: the Agent connects to the Client.

The short version

1. Provision a Linux VM with a public DNS name, download the release, extract it and run sudo bash install.sh.
2. Read the one-time setup token out of the service log, open /setup and create the admin account and TLS settings.
3. Get a free license, read the Node ID from Settings → License, activate, and paste the key back in. Skip this and you run as free Starter.
4. Create a support session in the portal and send the join link — or install the client as a service on the machines you want unattended access to.

Requirements

• Server: a Linux host with Node.js 18 or newer. Developed and tested on Debian with Node 22.
• Database: PostgreSQL in production — the Debian installer provisions it for you. Without DATABASE_URL the relay falls back to an in-memory store that is wiped on restart; that is for local development only.
• DNS + TLS: a public name pointing at the host, with ports 80 and 443 reachable so Let's Encrypt can issue. Browsers will not open a WebSocket to an untrusted certificate.
• Endpoints: Windows on the supported machines. The technician console is the browser page — a web page cannot be the supported-machine client, and there is no supported native technician application.

Where to go next