The LianRouter launcher. One command starts the gateway, opens its console, keeps it running in the background, and updates it — without cloning the repository.

LianRouter is a multi-provider gateway for OpenAI-compatible chat, embedding, and image APIs: one local endpoint, many upstream providers, with routing, keys, usage accounting, and an admin console. This package is only the launcher. The gateway itself is a separate compiled binary that this package installs on first run.

Install

bun add -g lianrouter
# or
npm i -g lianrouter

The bin runs under the Bun runtime and declares engines.bun, so Bun must be on PATH whichever package manager put the launcher there.

First run

lianrouter

The launcher does not download anything during bun add -g / npm i -g — an install that reaches the network breaks offline and CI installs. Instead, the first lianrouter run finds no gateway in the install root, fetches the release archive for your platform, verifies its sha256, and installs it atomically, showing progress while it downloads:

gateway not installed; fetching the latest release
  downloading  42%  19.2 MB / 44.7 MB
  verifying    78%  checksum ok (sha256 0123456789ab…)
  installing   90%  installed lianrouter.exe
Gateway 2.0.0 installed at ~/.local/share/LianRouter/lianrouter

An archive without a published digest is refused rather than installed, and a platform with no published build is told so by name instead of failing later at spawn. The newest release for your platform is installed regardless of how its version compares to the launcher's own, so a first release that shares the launcher's version still installs. Every subsequent run finds the binary and starts offline.

Installing the gateway is not the same as configuring it: the gateway still needs DATABASE_URL (and REDIS_URL when REDIS_MODE=normal) in its environment or a .env in its working directory before /health can answer. See README.md for the variable list; a startup failure prints the gateway's own error line.

Use

With no arguments, lianrouter starts the gateway and opens the menu — Web UI, Terminal UI, Hide to Tray, Exit. Subcommands skip the menu:

lianrouter start          # start in the foreground, then the menu
lianrouter status         # print state and exit
lianrouter stop           # stop the supervised gateway
lianrouter update         # check, install, restart
lianrouter tray           # background gateway with a tray icon (Windows)
lianrouter tui            # terminal console
lianrouter --version
lianrouter --help

status and stop never install anything: they answer a question about the current machine and must work offline. --port, --host, --no-open, and --background cover the rest.

Where things live

The gateway binary, migrations/, the console assets, the pid file, the log, and the update cache all live under one install root:

Platform	Root
Windows	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\LianRouter`
macOS	`~/Library/Application Support/LianRouter`
Linux	`$XDG_DATA_HOME/LianRouter`, else `~/.local/share/LianRouter`

LIANROUTER_HOME relocates the whole layout. The gateway logs to <root>/logs/lianrouter.log.

Documentation

cli/CLI.md covers the install root, the process model, the loopback control plane, the update flow, the tray, and the TUI. Product documentation for the gateway itself lives in the repository.