Installation

Installation

What you need

Ollama. Draggy does not ship a model runtime; it drives Ollama over localhost. If Draggy cannot find it on launch it will offer to install it for you, or you can get it yourself from ollama.com.

A graphics card, ideally. Draggy runs on anything, but the experience is decided almost entirely by how much VRAM you have. Four gigabytes is where it starts being pleasant. Below that it will pick smaller models and lean on the processor, which works but is slow enough that you will notice every reply. Apple Silicon does well because the memory is shared with the GPU.

Disk space. Around 10 GB for a typical model, plus a few hundred megabytes for the speech models if you use voice mode. Draggy checks free space before it downloads anything and refuses rather than filling your drive.

Installing

Download the installer for your platform from the Releases page.

• Windows: draggy_setup.exe. It asks where to install and does not require administrator rights.
• Linux: the AppImage runs as-is once you mark it executable, or install the .deb with sudo dpkg -i.
• macOS: build it yourself for now, see Building from Source. There is no signed release, so a downloaded build would not be able to update itself.

"Windows protected your PC"

Windows will show a blue SmartScreen dialog the first time you run the installer, saying the publisher is unknown. To get past it: click More info, then Run anyway.

This is worth understanding rather than just clicking through, because the same dialog appears in front of genuinely malicious software.

SmartScreen is not saying it found anything wrong with Draggy. It is saying the installer is not signed with a code signing certificate, so Windows has no publisher identity to attach to it and no history of other people running it safely. Certificates that satisfy it cost a few hundred a year for the kind that clears the warning immediately, and Draggy does not have one yet.

If you would rather verify the download than take that on trust, every release publishes a latest.yml next to the installer holding its SHA-512, base64 encoded. Compute the same thing in PowerShell and compare the two strings:

[Convert]::ToBase64String([Security.Cryptography.SHA512]::Create().ComputeHash([IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("draggy_setup.exe")))

Or simply build it yourself from source, which is the strongest answer to "how do I know what is in this" and is documented in Building from Source.

The Linux AppImage and .deb are unsigned too, but Linux does not put a dialog in front of them.

Antivirus and SmartScreen

Draggy is not code signed, and that is the whole reason Windows and some antivirus products treat it with suspicion. There is nothing an application can ship that makes a scanner skip it. Anything that did would be a technique for hiding malware, and scanners are built to ignore it.

What actually removes the warning is a code signing certificate, which is a few hundred pounds a year and has not been bought. Until then:

• SmartScreen shows the dialog above on first run. Reputation builds with downloads over time, so it fades on its own.
• Norton, McAfee and similar may quarantine an unsigned installer on sight, or upload it for analysis. That is them doing their job with a file they have never seen before.
• If one flags Draggy, report it as a false positive to that vendor. Every major one has a form, and it is the only thing that clears it for everybody rather than just for you.
• Verify the download yourself with the SHA-512 above rather than taking it on trust, or build from source.

The first launch

The first launch does more work than the rest. Draggy checks that Ollama is running, looks at your hardware, and if you have no usable model installed it picks one sized to your graphics card and downloads it. That download is the long part: a few gigabytes, once.

The splash screen tells you which stage it is on. If it stalls, see Troubleshooting.

After that, launches are quick. Nothing is downloaded again unless you ask for a different model or turn on voice mode for the first time.

Where things are kept

Everything lives in Electron's user data folder for the app:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Draggy
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Draggy
• Linux: ~/.config/Draggy

Inside it you will find draggy.db (chats, settings, the document index and any extension credentials), created_files/ (anything the assistant wrote for you), code_runs/ (scratch directories from the code tool) and model-cache/ (the speech models). Models themselves belong to Ollama and live wherever Ollama keeps them.

Extensions you switch on are fetched with npx and cached by npm, outside this folder.

Deleting that folder resets Draggy completely without touching your models.

Updates

Draggy updates itself. With Automatic updates on, which it is by default, it looks for a new version twenty seconds after launch and every six hours after that, and downloads what it finds in the background.

When one is ready, the next time you open Draggy a dialog offers Install now or Maybe later. Installing restarts the app and is silent: the installer does not ask where to put it or whether to continue, because you already answered that when you first installed. Choosing later leaves it for the next launch, and it installs on quit in any case.

Turn it off in Settings → Updates and nothing happens unless you press Check now. The same panel has Download and Restart and install buttons when an update is waiting.

Updates only work in an installed build. Running from source, the panel will say updates are disabled, which is correct.