A lightweight, secure Discord wrapper for Linux — built with Electron.

Vessel wraps discord.com in a native window with proper system notifications, tray support, and window-state memory. It is deliberately minimal: no patching, no plugin system, no telemetry. Just Discord, running reliably on your desktop without ever forcing a manual package download or full system upgrade just to keep chatting.

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Features

Feature	Details
System notifications	Routes Discord's web notifications through D-Bus (works on X11 and Wayland)
System tray	Minimize to tray; click to show/hide; unread badge in tray label
Window state	Remembers size, position, and maximized state between launches
Single instance	Focuses the existing window if you launch a second copy
Custom CSS	Drop a custom.css in the config directory to theme Discord
Unread badge	Parses Discord's page title and updates the tray label
Error page	Friendly offline screen instead of a blank white page
Keyboard shortcuts	Ctrl+R reload, Ctrl+Shift+I DevTools, F11 fullscreen
Secure by default	contextIsolation: true, sandbox: true, permission allowlist

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Installation

AppImage (recommended — works on any distro)

# Download the latest release
wget https://github.com/SauravSreejith/Vessel/releases/latest/download/Vessel-x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x Vessel-x86_64.AppImage
./Vessel-x86_64.AppImage

Debian / Ubuntu (.deb)

wget https://github.com/SauravSreejith/Vessel/releases/latest/download/vessel_1.0.0_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i vessel_1.0.0_amd64.deb

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Building from source

Requirements: Node.js ≥ 18, npm ≥ 9

git clone https://github.com/SauravSreejith/Vessel.git
cd vessel
npm install

# Run in development
npm start

# Build an AppImage
npm run dist:appimage

# Build all targets (AppImage + deb)
npm run build

⚠️ Important: Notification Setup

For Vessel to correctly forward alerts to your system (D-Bus), you must ensure Discord's internal notification setting is enabled:

1. Open User Settings in your Discord client.
2. Navigate to the Notifications tab in the left sidebar.
3. Ensure "Enable Desktop Notifications" is toggled ON (as shown below).

Note: If this setting is disabled, Vessel cannot intercept the notification events, and you will not receive system-wide alerts.

Icon

Place your icon at icons/icon.png (512×512 px recommended). electron-builder will automatically generate all required sizes. A fallback is used if no icon is provided.

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Custom CSS

Vessel loads a custom.css file from your config directory on every page load:

Platform	Path
Linux	~/.config/vessel/custom.css

Example — make the sidebar narrower:

nav[class*="guilds"] { width: 60px !important; }

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Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+R	Reload Discord
Ctrl+Shift+I	Open DevTools (dev builds only)
F11	Toggle fullscreen

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Security model

Setting	Value	Why
nodeIntegration	false	Page JS cannot access Node APIs
contextIsolation	true	Preload is isolated from page context
sandbox	true	Chromium sandbox fully enabled
setPermissionRequestHandler	Allowlist	Only notifications, media, clipboard-read, fullscreen are granted, and only to discord.com origins
Navigation guard	Enabled	External links open in the system browser; Discord-internal popups are sandboxed

The preload communicates with the main process over a narrow, typed IPC channel (show-notification, set-badge). No arbitrary code can be passed across the boundary.

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Why not the official Discord app?

The primary reason Vessel exists is the excruciating update process on Linux.

When the official Discord client pushes an update, it frequently locks you out until you update the local package. On Debian/Ubuntu, this means manually downloading and installing a 100MB .deb file over and over.

On rolling releases like Arch Linux, it's even worse. You can't just run pacman -S discord without risking a partial upgrade that breaks your .so system libraries. To safely update Discord, you are forced into running pacman -Syu — turning a simple chat app update into a mandatory 3-5 GB full system upgrade.

Because Vessel is a native wrapper around the web client, you never have to download an update just to keep chatting. The web client updates automatically on refresh. Vessel stays out of your way, running securely via Electron with contextIsolation and sandbox fully enabled. It's ~150 lines of code — you can read the entire source in five minutes.

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Troubleshooting

Notifications don't appear

• Ensure libnotify is installed: sudo apt install libnotify4 (Debian).
• Check your desktop notification settings haven't silenced the app.

Screen share / camera doesn't work

• Voice and video permissions are granted by default. If you're on Wayland, screen sharing may require --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer. You can set this in a .desktop file:

  Exec=/path/to/Vessel.AppImage --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer %U
  

Tray icon missing on GNOME

• Install the AppIndicator extension.

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Contributing

PRs are welcome. Please keep the scope minimal — Vessel's goal is to be a thin, auditable wrapper, not a full-featured client mod.

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License

MIT © 2026 Saurav Sreejith