Get Helena

Download & install

Grab a pre-built binary, or build from source in a couple of commands.

Helena showing request headers and a nested JSON response

Helena is free and open source, and it’s meant to stay that way. It’s built by a single developer, with a good deal of help from AI - nothing to buy, no paywall, and no feature held back.

Pre-built binaries

Pre-built Linux (amd64), Windows (amd64 & arm64), and macOS (arm64) binaries are attached to each release. On Windows, Helena is also a free listing on the Microsoft Store for a one-click install that keeps itself up to date.

Releases on GitHub → Microsoft Store →

Helena is a single self-contained binary - the download itself needs no installer and no runtime to set up. Download it, make it executable, and run it. On Linux, each release also attaches .deb and .rpm packages (the binary plus a desktop entry and icon) if you’d rather install through your package manager.

macOS builds are unsigned, for two entirely mundane reasons: I don’t have a (paid) Apple Developer account, and I don’t own a Mac to notarize on. The binaries are still built and tested in CI - you’ll just need to allow them past Gatekeeper (right-click the app → Open). If you’d like to sponsor code-signing and notarization - or a Mac to do it on - I’m more than open to it (see Support the project below). More detail in PACKAGING.

Release builds omit Fyne’s bundled colour-emoji font to cut resident memory (~75 MB): colour emoji in response bodies render as blank glyphs; all other text is unaffected. Build from source without -tags no_emoji if you want colour emoji.

Helena never checks for updates at runtime (part of its no-background-traffic guarantee) - update by re-downloading a release or via a package manager as those land. Run helena --version to see your build.

Support the project

Helena is free everywhere - including the Microsoft Store - and nothing is locked behind it. But if it’s useful to you and you’d like to chip in toward its development, thank you. Two entirely voluntary ways:

Sponsorship also directly unblocks things like signed macOS builds (see the note above).

Buy me a coffee GitHub Sponsors

Build from source

Building Helena yourself is free, forever, on every platform. The quick version is below; the full copy-paste guide (per-distro dependencies, release-grade build flags, cross-arch notes, troubleshooting) is in BUILDING.

Requirements

  • Go 1.26+ (the toolchain is pinned in go.mod).
  • A C compiler - Fyne uses cgo + OpenGL.
  • Linux: sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev
  • Windows: TDM-GCC or MSYS2 mingw-w64 on PATH
  • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)

Linux / macOS / WSL

git clone https://github.com/ideaconnect/helena
cd helena
make build   # → ./bin/helena   (or: go build -o helena ./cmd/helena)
make run     # build & run
make test    # run all tests

Windows (Cmd or PowerShell)

make.bat build   :: writes bin\helena.exe
make.bat run

A local go build reports version dev; released binaries report their tag and commit. For bug reports, helena --verbose raises the log level and --log-file PATH tees logs to a file (credentials are redacted, so logs are safe to attach).

Next steps