Waterfowl

A fast, native desktop client for PostgreSQL — browse your schema, run queries, edit data, and export results, without a browser tab in sight.

Work in progress. Waterfowl is usable but still early. Don't point it at a production database you care about yet.

Features

• Connections — save and manage multiple PostgreSQL connections, test them before connecting.
• Schema browser — tables, views, functions, sequences and enums for every schema in the database.
• Data grid — page through table and view data, filter by column, hide columns you don't need, and edit cells in place.
• Query editor — run single queries or whole scripts, with per-statement results.
• Export — write tables, views or a filtered selection out as CSV, JSON (array or NDJSON) or SQL INSERT statements. Exports stream to disk, so table size isn't limited by available memory.
• Auto-updates — new releases are picked up in the background.

Installing

Grab the latest build for your platform from the releases page:

Platform	File
macOS (Apple Silicon)	.dmg
Windows	.msi or .exe
Linux	.AppImage, .deb or .rpm

macOS and Windows will warn that the app is from an unidentified developer — the builds aren't code-signed yet.

Building from source

You'll need Node.js 24, pnpm and a Rust toolchain. On Debian/Ubuntu you'll also need the system libraries Tauri builds against:

sudo apt-get install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libappindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf

Then:

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # run in development mode
pnpm tauri build    # produce a release binary for your platform

Development

Most of the interesting code talks to a live PostgreSQL server, so there's a seeded test database to develop against:

podman compose -f dev/compose.yaml up -d   # or `docker compose`
pnpm seed

That gives you postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/waterfowl_test, populated with tables covering a wide range of PostgreSQL types.

Running the tests:

pnpm test                       # frontend
cd src-tauri && cargo test      # backend

The backend tests that need a database skip themselves when it isn't running, and still report success — so bring the database up first, or you'll be looking at a green suite that tested nothing.

Tear it down with podman compose -f dev/compose.yaml down -v.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you're picking up something larger, open an issue first so we can talk it through — TODO.md tracks what's planned and what's known to be broken.