Add a "Reconnect" option to the desktop tray menu

[atj393]

Before posting

• I searched existing discussions and issues for similar requests.
• I checked the documentation to confirm this is not already supported.
• This is a product idea or enhancement request, not a support question.
• I removed or anonymized sensitive details from examples and screenshots.

Product area

Desktop UI

Problem or use case

When the NetBird client ends up in a stale or degraded state, the fix is almost always "disconnect, then connect again". The tray menu only exposes Connect and Disconnect, so that means: right-click the tray icon, click Disconnect, wait for the state to settle, right-click again, click Connect.

Situations where this comes up regularly:

• Waking a laptop from sleep or hibernate.
• Roaming between networks (Wi-Fi to ethernet, Wi-Fi to LTE tethering, office to home).
• Coming back from another VPN that touched routes or DNS.
• Peers show as connected but traffic doesn't flow, and a clean re-establish fixes it.

It's small friction each time, but it happens often, and it's awkward to walk a non-technical colleague through a two-step sequence over the phone. "Right-click NetBird, click Reconnect" is a single instruction that's hard to get wrong.

Proposed solution

Add a single Reconnect entry to the tray menu (right-click on the tray icon) that performs a Down followed by an Up in one action.

Behaviour:

• Keep Connect and Disconnect exactly as they are. Reconnect is an addition, not a replacement.
• While it runs, reflect the transitional state in the menu / tooltip (e.g. "Reconnecting...") so the user gets feedback rather than a menu that appears to do nothing.
• Enable it only when the client is connected or connecting; grey it out when already disconnected.
• Same behaviour on Windows, macOS and Linux, since the tray menu is shared code.

Optionally it could also live under a keyboard-accessible position near Connect/Disconnect so it's discoverable without hunting through submenus.

Alternatives or workarounds considered

• netbird down && netbird up from a terminal. Works, but not realistic for non-technical users, especially on Windows where they'd need an elevated shell.
• Restarting the NetBird service from services.msc / systemctl. Heavier and slower than needed, and requires admin rights.
• Quitting and relaunching the UI. Doesn't reliably re-establish the tunnel and is more disruptive.
• The existing automatic reconnect logic. It helps in many cases, but it doesn't cover the situation where the user already knows the connection is stale and wants to force a clean re-establish immediately rather than wait for backoff/detection.

Community impact and priority

• Affects any desktop user, on all three platforms. Windows end users in particular, since that's where the tray icon is the primary interface.
• Frequency: whenever a laptop sleeps or changes network, so for a mobile workforce this can be daily.
• Not a production blocker. This is a usability and supportability improvement, not a correctness fix.
• Meaningful reduction in support load: one instruction instead of a sequence, and fewer users escalating a stale connection because they didn't think to toggle it off and on.

Examples from other tools or products

OpenVPN GUI on Windows has had exactly this for years: its tray menu offers Connect, Disconnect and Reconnect side by side, and Reconnect is what most users reach for when a tunnel goes stale.

Several other desktop VPN and sync clients expose an equivalent "Reconnect" or "Restart connection" action from the tray/menu bar for the same reason: a full toggle is the common remedy and it deserves a single control.

Security, privacy, and compatibility considerations

No new capability or permission is introduced. Reconnect performs the same two operations the user can already trigger manually (Down then Up), so it's the same authorization surface as today's menu.

Backward compatibility: purely additive to the menu, no change to existing Connect/Disconnect behaviour, no config or API change required.

One thing worth deciding: if the session has expired, Reconnect would presumably surface the same interactive login flow that Connect does today, rather than failing silently.

Implementation ideas

Rough sketch, happy to be corrected: the tray menu is built in the client UI layer, so this would be a new menu item alongside the existing Connect/Disconnect entries whose handler invokes the daemon's Down and then Up, awaiting the first before issuing the second.

The parts that likely need care rather than the happy path:

• Guarding against double-invocation while a reconnect is in flight (disable the item until it settles).
• Making sure the transitional state is rendered, given the menu is rebuilt on status changes.
• Ensuring a failed Down doesn't leave the client in a state where Up is never issued.

Are you willing to help?

Yes, I can submit a PR if the approach is accepted.

Additional context

I searched existing discussions, open and closed issues, and open PRs, and couldn't find an existing request for a manual Reconnect menu item. The many "reconnect" issues in the tracker are all about automatic reconnection failing, which is a different problem.

Related but distinct:

• Provide a way for end user to extend the session w/o a need to disconnect and reconnect #4209 - extending a session without needing to disconnect/reconnect.
• SSO token expiry leaves client in stale "Connected" state — requires manual disconnect/reconnect to re-authenticate #5513 - stale "Connected" state after SSO token expiry, which currently requires a manual disconnect/reconnect.

Both are cases where a one-click Reconnect would be the natural user-facing remedy.

Happy to test a build on Windows if this gets picked up.