KV Studio

A native macOS client and control plane for go-kv-store.

Browse keys, inspect binary-safe values, run commands, manage a local kv-server, and watch its logs — from one native Swift application.

Install

Download the notarized .dmg from the latest release and drag KV Studio to Applications. A kv-server 1.2.0 is bundled, so Start Local Server works with nothing else installed.

Features

• Key browser — infinite scrolling over SCAN, with server-side MATCH search
• Value inspector — Text, formatted JSON, or a hex dump, chosen automatically or by hand
• Binary-safe — arbitrary bytes round-trip without corruption
• Built-in console — send RESP2 commands and read the raw reply
• Local server management — start, stop, and restart a kv-server KV Studio owns
• Existing servers — connect to one you already run, probed for compatibility first
• Live logs — search, pause, and clear
• Safe process ownership — never signals a process it cannot prove is its own
• Automatic updates — SHA-256 verified, with rollback when a backend fails to start

How it fits together

                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │      KV Studio      │
                    │       SwiftUI       │
                    └──────────┬──────────┘
                               │
              ┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
              │                │                │
              ▼                ▼                ▼
          Browser           Console           Logs
              │                │                │
              └────────────────┼────────────────┘
                               │
                         RESP2 / TCP
                               │
                               ▼
                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │      kv-server      │
                    │     go-kv-store     │
                    └─────────────────────┘

KV Studio speaks the server's RESP2 wire protocol directly from Swift, with no Redis client dependency. The Browser and the Console get separate connections, so a long traversal never sits in front of a command.

Binary-safe by design

Keys and values are Data end to end and are never forced through String.

UTF-8 value  →  Text
JSON value   →  Formatted JSON
Binary data  →  Hex

NUL, CRLF, invalid UTF-8, and arbitrary bytes all round-trip unchanged — there are tests that assert exactly that against a real server. Copying a value copies text when it is text and hex when it is not, so no byte is lost to a replacement character. Keys can be created in Text or Hex.

Local server or an existing one

Local — KV Studio runs one kv-server on 127.0.0.1:6380, with --appendonly and --appendfsync everysec.

• Owns the process it started and adopts its own server again after a crash
• Shuts it down gracefully when you quit
• Never takes over a port it does not own; it offers to connect instead
• Data lives under ~/Library/Application Support/KV Studio/

Existing — give a host and port.

• Probed with PING, DBSIZE, and SCAN 0 COUNT 1 before it is trusted
• A server that fails the probe is reported, not connected to
• Process controls and log capture are hidden for a server KV Studio does not manage
• Disconnect closes the connection and leaves the server running

Screenshots

Value inspector

Key browser

Hex viewer

Console

Server management

Updates

KV Studio checks on launch or on demand, and nothing installs itself.

Every archive is verified against its published SHA-256 before it is unpacked. The backend is updated first and compatibility-checked; one that fails to start is rolled back to the previous working version automatically.

See docs/updater.md for the full flow.

Build from source

Requires Xcode 16 or later.

git clone https://github.com/Aybavs/KV-Studio.git
cd KV-Studio
xcodebuild build -project KVStudio.xcodeproj -scheme KVStudio -configuration Debug

For a development backend:

./scripts/build-test-backend.sh    # builds .build/kv-server for the test suites
./scripts/install-dev-backend.sh   # installs one where the app looks for it

Tests

The unit and integration suites are a plain xcodebuild call. Several of them start a real kv-server, so build the test backend above first or they skip themselves.

xcodebuild test -project KVStudio.xcodeproj -scheme KVStudio -configuration Debug -only-testing:KVStudioTests

The end-to-end suite has to go through its script:

./scripts/run-ui-tests.sh

Xcode signs the UI-test runner from its own template, which sandboxes it without permission to listen. Five scenarios start a server of their own, and both the runner and everything it spawns are refused, so the script re-signs the runner between building and running. Quit any Xcode Run session first: a debugger-attached app cannot be replaced by the runner, and the suite stops with that reason rather than working around it.

Limitations

• macOS only
• One managed local server at a time
• No custom data directory
• No TLS or authentication UI
• No RESP3, no cluster UI, no Pub/Sub
• Not a general Redis client — compatibility is decided by capability, so other servers offering PING, DBSIZE, and SCAN may connect, but nothing beyond that is supported

Documentation

• Architecture
• Updater and rollback
• Privacy and security
• Troubleshooting

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The bundled kv-server comes from go-kv-store, which is MIT as well; Sparkle is under its own MIT-style licence.