Ways to run it

There is no wrong choice here. They all run the identical application, and in every case the computation happens on your own machine and nothing you load is sent anywhere.

In a browser, nothing to install

https://professorquantumuniverse.github.io/wifi-sim/

This is the right answer for almost everyone. The page loads once and then everything, the wall tracing and the coverage solve included, runs locally in your browser.

"Hosted" here only means the program itself is downloaded from GitHub, the same way any web page is. Your floorplan is never uploaded, because there is nothing on the other end to upload it to.

Locally, one command

npx wifi-sim@latest

This downloads the built app, starts a small web server on your own machine and opens a browser at it. It needs Node.js 18 or newer and nothing else. Press Ctrl+C to stop it.

Options:

npx wifi-sim --port 8080     # listen somewhere else
npx wifi-sim --no-open       # do not open a browser
npx wifi-sim --host 0.0.0.0  # reachable from other machines on your network

By default it binds to 127.0.0.1, so only your own machine can reach it.

To update, run the same command again. The @latest is what makes npm fetch a new version rather than reuse the one it cached.

In a container

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/professorquantumuniverse/wifi-sim:latest

Then open http://localhost:8080. No Node, no toolchain, and once the image is pulled it works with no internet connection at all. This is the easiest option on a locked-down work machine or a home server.

On your own web server

Every release has a wifi-sim-dist.zip attached. Unpack it into any directory your web server serves and you are done. It is plain static files, no server side, no database, no configuration.

From source

Only worth it if you want to change something.

git clone https://github.com/ProfessorQuantumUniverse/wifi-sim.git
cd wifi-sim
npm install
npm run dev

See architecture for what lives where, and contributing before you send a change.

Why there is no double-clickable HTML file

It would be the nicest option and it does not work. The wall tracing and the coverage solve both run in Web Workers, so they do not freeze the interface while they think, and browsers refuse to start a worker on a page opened from the file system. A single HTML file would open, look completely normal, and then do nothing when you pressed either of the two buttons that matter.

Anything on this page that runs locally therefore starts a small local web server. That is the whole reason npx wifi-sim exists rather than a download.