Aether-GUI

Aether-GUI

[Release] [License: AGPL v3] [Platform] [Tauri] [React] [Rust]

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A one-click desktop GUI for Aether, a censorship-circumvention tunnel built for heavily restricted networks. Aether itself is a terminal tool: it discovers a working route out, establishes an encrypted tunnel, and exposes a local SOCKS5 proxy. Aether-GUI wraps that terminal tool in a small, animated desktop app so you don't have to touch a command line to use it — press Connect, and everything else (identity provisioning, route discovery, prompt answering) happens automatically in the background.

This project does not reimplement any of Aether's tunneling logic. It drives the real aether binary in a pseudo-terminal, answers its interactive setup prompts on your behalf, and watches its output to tell you what's happening. All the actual censorship-circumvention work — MASQUE/QUIC obfuscation, WireGuard, route probing — is Aether's, not this repo's.

Features

• Auto mode — the default screen is just a single button. No configuration is required; it connects using your last-successful settings (or sensible defaults on first run).

• Advanced panel — for when you want control, a collapsible panel exposes the real options Aether's setup supports:

  • Protocol: MASQUE (disguises traffic as normal HTTPS), WireGuard (lighter, faster), or WARP-in-WARP/gool (two nested WireGuard tunnels), or MASQUE-in-MASQUE (two nested MASQUE hops) — the nested modes give a different exit address at a speed cost
  • Scan Mode: Turbo, Balanced, Thorough, Verified (only edges measured to work), or Ironclad — trading route-discovery speed against how much probe traffic it generates; Ironclad opens a real tunnel through each candidate and sends a real HTTP request before trusting it (slowest, but guaranteed working)
  • IP Version: IPv4, IPv6, or both
  • MASQUE Transport: HTTP/3 (QUIC — fastest handshake) or HTTP/2 (TCP — looks like ordinary HTTPS, works where UDP is blocked or throttled)
  • Obfuscation: how heavily the handshake is disguised from DPI — profiles adapt to the selected protocol; escalate if the default can't get through
  • Network: carry Psiphon or Tor — alone, inside the WARP tunnel, or with WARP dialled through them. Psiphon works out of the box and connects in seconds, which makes it a good first thing to try on a heavily filtered network
  • Set as system proxy: while connected, points the OS proxy setting at the tunnel (through a local HTTP proxy) so browsers and most apps use it with no setup; the previous setting is restored on disconnect, on exit, and even after a crash
  • HTTP Proxy, Upstream & Exit: an extra HTTP CONNECT proxy for apps without SOCKS5, chaining through another proxy already running on your machine, and an exit-country filter that refuses tunnels leaving from unwanted countries
  • Quick reconnect: remember the last working gateway and re-test it first, skipping the full scan when it still works

  Each option has an explanation on hover.

• Runs in the background — optional Start on login (launches minimized to the tray) and Connect on launch. The tray icon gets a green dot while connected and an amber one while connecting, and its menu has Connect / Disconnect.

• Logs you can use — copy the log to the clipboard or clear it from the Advanced panel.

• Live progress — while Aether searches for a working route, the GUI shows real elapsed time and, once Aether reports its own scan budget, an actual percentage and progress bar — not just a spinner.

• Automatic reconnect — if the tunnel drops unexpectedly mid-session (observed occasionally with WARP-in-WARP, but handled the same way for every protocol), the GUI retries automatically with backoff, shown as a visible "Reconnecting… (attempt N of 3)" rather than silently dying or dumping you back to a bare error. A user-requested disconnect is never retried.

Installing

Grab the latest installer from the Releases page:

• Aether-GUI_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe — standard installer (recommended)
• Aether-GUI_x.y.z_x64_en-US.msi — MSI package, for scripted or enterprise installs

Windows x64 only for now — see Building from source for other platforms.

Building from source

1. Prerequisites

   • Node.js and npm
   • Rust (stable toolchain)
   • Tauri's platform prerequisites — see the Tauri v2 prerequisites guide (on Windows this is the MSVC C++ Build Tools + WebView2 Runtime, both usually already present; macOS needs Xcode Command Line Tools; Linux needs webkit2gtk and friends)

2. Install frontend dependencies

   npm install
   

3. Fetch the Aether binary

   Aether-GUI bundles the real aether binary from CluvexStudio/Aether releases rather than building it — this repo only ships the GUI. Fetch and checksum-verify it for your platform:

   On Linux and macOS:

   ./src-tauri/binaries/fetch-aether.sh
   

   On Windows (PowerShell):

   ./src-tauri/binaries/fetch-aether.ps1
   

   Both scripts read the version pin from src-tauri/binaries/AETHER_VERSION and verify the download against the release's published SHA256SUMS.txt. CI runs these same two scripts, so a local build and a release build get the identical core. Running fetch-aether.sh from Git Bash on Windows just hands off to the PowerShell one.

   This step is not optional. Skipping it still produces a working build, but the app boots straight into its "engine missing" screen, because there is no tunnel engine inside it to drive.

4. Run in development mode

   npm run tauri dev
   

5. Build a release installer

   npm run tauri build
   

   Installers land under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/ (NSIS .exe and .msi on Windows; .dmg/.app on macOS; .deb/.AppImage/.rpm on Linux — cross-platform bundles must each be built on their own OS, or via CI).

How it works

• Frontend: React 19 + Tailwind v4, state managed with Zustand, animated with Motion — all talking to the Rust backend over Tauri's IPC. Deliberately lightweight: the ambient background is two compositor-only CSS gradient orbs, and every looping animation freezes while the window is unfocused, so the app costs next to nothing sitting in the background.
• Backend: Rust, using portable-pty to spawn the real Aether v2.1.0 binary in a genuine pseudo-terminal (the Tor and Psiphon helpers ship in pt/ beside it, and are stopped together with it). Your chosen profile — protocol, scan mode, IP version, MASQUE transport (HTTP/3 or HTTP/2), obfuscation profile, quick reconnect, Zero Trust, tunnel DNS, routing rules, HTTP proxy, upstream proxy and exit-country filter — is passed up front as CLI flags/environment, so Aether's interactive prompts normally never appear. A Zero Trust email-code prompt is bridged safely into the GUI; credentials are never written to the saved profile.
• Ground truth for "connected": the GUI doesn't trust Aether's log wording alone (that's fragile across releases) — it treats a successful TCP connection to the local SOCKS5 port (127.0.0.1:1819) as the actual proof the tunnel is up.
• State machine: Idle → Launching → Connecting → Connected, with Reconnecting and Error as the two ways a connection attempt can end up needing your attention — Reconnecting retries automatically (with backoff, capped at 3 attempts), Error is the final word once retries are exhausted or something isn't retriable (e.g. the binary itself is missing).

About Aether

Aether is the actual censorship-circumvention engine this app wraps — a standalone terminal tool that discovers reachable routes and establishes the tunnel, independent of any GUI. If you'd rather use it directly from a terminal, or want to understand exactly what it's doing under the hood, that's the repo to read. Aether-GUI exists purely to make that tool one click away for people who don't want to live in a terminal.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.