Worked example: Acme Studio

This walkthrough ships Acme Studio from a fork at acme-corp/frogg. It uses brands/example, which is already in the repository, so every command here works on a fresh clone. Output shown is real output from this repository at 0.6.19.

The brand

brands/example/brand.json

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "id": "acme",
  "name": "Acme Studio",
  "applicationId": "com.acme.studio",
  "daemonPort": 10099,
  "assets": { "icon": "./icon.svg" },
  "colors": {
    "light": { "accent": "#6d28d9", "accentForeground": "#ffffff", "background": "#faf5ff", "foreground": "#27143d" },
    "dark": { "accent": "#c4b5fd", "accentForeground": "#27143d", "background": "#20152e", "foreground": "#faf5ff" }
  }
}

icon.svg is a 1024 × 1024 purple tile with a white “A”. There is no distribution block, so updates are disabled, and no services, so there is no hosted pairing page or relay.

1. Fork, clone and check

1. Fork frogg-app/frogg to acme-corp on GitHub and enable Actions in the fork.

2. Clone and add upstream:

   git clone https://github.com/acme-corp/frogg.git acme-studio && cd acme-studio
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/frogg-app/frogg.git
   npm ci

3. Copy the example into a directory you own, so later upstream changes to the example never touch your product:

   cp -r brands/example brands/acme

4. Check it:

   npm run --silent brand:check -- --brand brands/acme

   Acme Studio: valid (com.acme.studio); updates disabled

2. Point updates at the fork

Add distribution details so releases, updates and installers use acme-corp/frogg:

brands/acme/brand.json (added)

  "publisher": "Acme Corp",
  "links": {
    "website": "https://studio.acme.example",
    "support": "https://github.com/acme-corp/frogg/issues"
  },
  "distribution": {
    "repository": "acme-corp/frogg",
    "updates": "github-release"
  }

npm run --silent brand:check -- --brand brands/acme

Acme Studio: valid (com.acme.studio); updates github-release

Commit the brand on main:

git add brands/acme
git commit -m "Add Acme Studio brand"
git push origin main

3. Run it locally

export FROGG_BRAND_DIR=brands/acme
npm run dev:server    # terminal 1: listens on 0.0.0.0:10099, state in .dev/acme-home
npm run dev:app       # terminal 2: Expo on 10100

Open http://<your-host>:10100 in a browser, or run npm run dev:desktop for the Electron shell. The window, icon, favicon, accent colour and product name are Acme’s.

To try the production shape instead (daemon serving its own web UI):

export FROGG_BRAND_DIR=brands/acme
npm run build:server && npm run build:daemon-web-ui
ACME_HOME=/tmp/acme-home node apps/cli/bin/frogg start --listen 0.0.0.0:10099 --web-ui

The CLI built from this checkout is branded, even though the in-repo launcher file is still called frogg:

$ node apps/cli/bin/frogg --help
Usage: acme [options] [command]

Acme Studio CLI - control your AI coding agents from the command line

$ node apps/cli/bin/frogg status
KEY               VALUE
Local Daemon      running
Acme Studio Home  /tmp/acme-home
Listen            0.0.0.0:10099
Relay             disabled
...

4. Coexist with stock frogg

Acme and frogg can run on the same machine. Their identities do not overlap:

Resource	frogg	Acme Studio
CLI	frogg	acme
State	~/.frogg	~/.acme
Env override	FROGG_HOME	ACME_HOME
Port	9999	10099
systemd unit	frogg-daemon	acme-daemon
launchd label	app.frogg.frogg-daemon	com.acme.studio-daemon
URL scheme	frogg://	acme://
App ID	app.frogg.frogg	com.acme.studio
Desktop binary	frogg	acme (Electron executable uses the brand id)
Skills installed for agents	frogg, frogg-dev, …	acme-frogg, acme-frogg-dev, …

Branding CI runs both daemons side by side to check this (scripts/ci/branding-runtime-isolation.mjs).

5. Configure CI

gh variable set FROGG_BRAND_DIR --body brands/acme --repo acme-corp/frogg

# Android release signing (do this before the first release)
keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore acme-release.keystore -alias acme -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -validity 10000
gh secret set FROGG_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_BASE64 --body "$(base64 -w0 acme-release.keystore)" --repo acme-corp/frogg
gh secret set FROGG_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD --repo acme-corp/frogg
gh secret set FROGG_ANDROID_KEY_ALIAS --body acme --repo acme-corp/frogg

# Optional: Windows signing, Docker Hub
gh secret set AZURE_TENANT_ID --repo acme-corp/frogg
# ... AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET, TRUSTED_SIGNING_ENDPOINT, TRUSTED_SIGNING_ACCOUNT, TRUSTED_SIGNING_PROFILE

Try a test build before tagging anything:

gh workflow run build-selected.yml --repo acme-corp/frogg -f target=all
gh run list --repo acme-corp/frogg --workflow build-selected.yml --limit 1

The run uploads windows-x64-client-<sha>, linux-x64-daemon-<sha> and android-arm64-debug-signed-<sha> artifacts named with the acme prefix.

6. First release (beta)

npm run version:all:beta:patch      # 0.6.19 -> 0.6.20-beta.1, commits the bump

Add a changelog section, amend it into the release commit, then tag and push:

CHANGELOG.md

## 0.6.20-beta.1 — 2026-09-20

- First Acme Studio beta, based on frogg 0.6.19.

git add CHANGELOG.md && git commit --amend --no-edit
git tag -d v0.6.20-beta.1 2>/dev/null   # npm version tagged the pre-amend commit
npm run release:push                     # tags HEAD as v0.6.20-beta.1 and pushes

The Release workflow creates a draft Acme Studio 0.6.20-beta.1 prerelease, builds every platform, uploads acme-... assets and the generated installers, then publishes.

Install the daemon from it on a test host, and the desktop app from the release page:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/acme-corp/frogg/releases/download/v0.6.20-beta.1/install.sh | bash
acme status

Ship a second beta the same way and confirm the desktop app (on the beta channel) and acme update --channel beta both move to it. Then release stable with npm run version:all:promote and npm run release:push.

7. Keep going

• Merge upstream regularly.
• Contribute shared fixes back from branches based on upstream/main.