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Getting It Running (Plain Language)

This page walks you through getting WorkWingman running on your own computer, in friendly steps. You don't need to be an engineer to follow along — but you will be using a few "terminal" windows (the black text-command windows), and that's normal for this kind of app.

Everything here runs on your own Windows computer. Nothing about you is uploaded to a company's servers to make this work.

What the pieces are

WorkWingman is really three parts working together:

  • The brain — a program called the API (built on .NET). It does the thinking: reading your saved jobs, tailoring documents, keeping your data. It talks only to your own computer at a private address, never to the outside world.
  • The face — the Angular app. This is the screens you actually look at and click.
  • The window — Electron. This is the desktop window that wraps the brain and the face into one app icon you can open, like any normal program.

In everyday use these are bundled together. While developing (working on the code), you start them separately so you can see what each one is doing.

Before you start: three things to install

Install these once. Each links to the official download page:

  1. .NET 10 — the engine the brain runs on. Download
  2. Node.js 22.12 or newer — the engine the face and the window run on. Download. It must be 22.12 or newer — the app will politely refuse to install with an older version, on purpose, so nothing breaks in a confusing way later.
  3. Git — how you download the code. Download

Get the code

In a terminal:

git clone https://github.com/andrewjonesdev/WorkWingman.git
cd WorkWingman

Start it up (three little windows)

Open three terminal windows. Each one runs one piece and keeps running.

Window 1 — start the brain:

dotnet run --project src/WorkWingman.Api

It settles at a private address on your own machine (127.0.0.1:5211). Leave it running.

Window 2 — start the face:

cd frontend
npm install
npm start

Then open http://localhost:4200 in your browser. That's the app.

Window 3 — the desktop window (optional):

cd electron
npm install
npm run dev

This gives you the real app-in-a-window experience. You can skip it — the browser at localhost:4200 works fine on its own, as long as Window 1 (the brain) is running.

The first-launch health check

The very first time you open WorkWingman, it runs a quick health check. It looks for the handful of extra tools it needs (a browser engine for filling forms, a password vault, a couple of helpers) and tells you if any are missing or out of date.

If something needs installing, it asks you first, one item at a time, and only installs what you approve. It never installs things behind your back, and there's no "just install everything" button — that's deliberate.

If something goes wrong

  • It complains that Node is too old. Install Node 22.12 or newer from nodejs.org and try again. This is the app protecting you from a version that would cause weird problems later.
  • The screens load but nothing loads any data. The brain (Window 1) probably isn't running. Make sure that first dotnet run window is still open and hasn't errored out.
  • It says the vault is locked. Your passwords live in a locked vault. Unlock it from the vault screen before trying to run an application. (Even unlocked, the vault never hands your passwords to the screens — it only uses them quietly, at the exact moment a form needs them.)

A quick reassurance

All of this — the brain, the face, the window, your saved jobs, your documents, your passwords — lives on your computer. The brain only ever talks to your own machine, at a private address the outside internet can't reach. You're running your own copy, for you.