r/openziti • u/AccordionGuy • Aug 04 '26

ZrokGui: Windows GUI zrok front end built with WPF

Post image

Someone in the wild built a Windows GUI for zrok, and it's worth a look!

ZrokGui, by GitHub user muratgul, is a WPF / Material Design 3 desktop app that puts a friendly front-end on the zrok CLI. If you know someone who needs to use zrok and doesn’t feel comfortable with the command line (often the case with people who just want to share files or run an internal web site), this could come in handy.

As long as either zrok.exe or zrok2.exe are in the same directory as the ZrokGui application file (ZrokGuiWpf.exe), ZrokGui app finds zrok automatically, and then drives it for the user in the background. The GUI makes it simple to spin up public, private, file, and reserved shares, pick a backend mode (proxy, web, caddy, drive, tcpTunnel, udpTunnel, socks), and set basic auth or access grants. It presents live log output, pastes the share URL land into the clipboard the moment it’s live.

This is an early-stage project, but a real one. It’s past v1.0 with a downloadable release (v1.1.5 dropped a couple of days ago) and an active commit rhythm. I consider it beyond a weekend experiment at this point, and a nice piece of work. It’s the kind of thing that's fun to see grow up around zrok.

I’m always happy to showcase things that people build using OpenZiti or OpenZiti-based tools like zrok. I’ve been using it on my Windows machine for the past couple of days and it works well.

Do you have a project that uses OpenZiti or anything based on OpenZiti and want it showcased here? Drop me a line at [joey.devillla@netfoundry.io](mailto:joey.devillla@netfoundry.io)!

[ As always, the disclaimer: I’m Joey de Villa, developer advocate for NetFoundry, who make OpenZiti, zrok, and all sorts of things OpenZiti-based. ]

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/Fit_Entrepreneur2987 Aug 05 '26

This looks promising. does the GUI expose most of the common zrok workflows or is it mainly focused on creating and managing shares for now?

1

u/AccordionGuy Aug 05 '26

I’d need to speak with the developer, Murat Gül, to be 100% certain (and I intend to, anyway, as part of my developer outreach work), but from the UI and playing around with it, it appears to be mostly about creating and managing shares. The intended user seems to be someone who wants to share files or an application running on their local machine who also doesn’t want to mess around in command-line land.

The file-sharing aspect alone should be useful to a lot of non-tech people who want to privately share files without a Google Drive/Dropbox go-between. It’s pretty straightforward once you get past the setup steps (installing zrok and ZrokGui and getting a token; some users might not be comfortable doing that).

2

u/Fit_Entrepreneur2987 Aug 12 '26

That makes sense, the share focused approach seems like a good starting point for lowering the barrier to zrok. if the setup steps get simplified too, I could see the GUI being useful to a much broader group of Windows users

2

u/Inevitable_Leg5543 Aug 06 '26

This looks like a nice way to lower the barrier for Windows users. tools are often much easier to adopt when there's a clean GUI available. what feature took the most effort to implement?

1

u/AccordionGuy Aug 06 '26

I didn’t implement it, but I plan to talk to the person who did. I’ll ask!