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Install the Print Agent

A small desktop helper that runs in the background on the computer your card printer is plugged into. Installing it once per workstation is the difference between popup-print and silent one-click printing.

Why this exists

Browsers don’t expose a “send this PDF to a specific printer” API. The Print Agent fills that gap: it runs a tiny local HTTP listener on port 9988 that BadgeBadger talks to when you click Print. The result is a one-click, no-dialog print. Without the agent you get a popup window and the OS print dialog every time — usable, but slower.

Windows

  1. Open Settings → Print agents on hq.badgebadger.app and click Download Print Agent. (Direct link: GitHub releases.)
  2. Choose BadgeBadger.Print.Agent_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe (NSIS installer) or the .msi if your IT department prefers MSI.
  3. Run the installer. Windows SmartScreen may show a “Windows protected your PC” warning for new versions; click More info → Run anyway (this is normal for un-EV-signed Tauri apps).
  4. The agent will install SumatraPDFalongside itself if it’s not already on your PATH. SumatraPDF is the bridge between PDF and the Windows print spooler — stock Windows’s default PDF handler (Edge) can’t print to a named queue silently, so we bundle it.
  5. The agent should auto-launch and add itself to your login items. Look for the badger icon in the system tray.

macOS

  1. Download the .dmg from GitHub releases. The arm64 build supports Apple Silicon (M1+). Intel-Mac users: email help@badgebadger.app and we’ll prioritise the Intel build.
  2. Open the .dmg and drag BadgeBadger Print Agent to Applications.
  3. The first launch will be blocked by Gatekeeper with “cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.” This is expected — we don’t pay for Apple notarisation yet. Right- click the app icon in Applications and choose Open; macOS will let you bypass the warning once and remember the choice.
  4. PDFs print through CUPS (lp) which is built into macOS, so no extra helper to install.
About the Gatekeeper warning— the agent isn’t malware; we just haven’t bought an Apple Developer cert yet. The Tauri updater itself has cryptographic signature verification baked in, so future updates from BadgeBadger don’t trip Gatekeeper.

What the agent does on your machine

  • Listens on http://127.0.0.1:9988 for print requests from your browser.
  • Enumerates your installed printers and reports them to BadgeBadger so the picker can show them.
  • Polls BadgeBadger every couple of seconds for cross-machineprint jobs you might have dispatched from a phone or another workstation. Idle-backs off to 30 seconds when nothing’s queued.
  • Stores a single 256-bit token on disk to authenticate against the cloud dispatch endpoint. No employee data is stored on the workstation.

Uninstall

Windows: standard Add/Remove Programs. macOS: drag the app from Applications to the Trash. The agent leaves a small token file behind in your app-data directory; you can delete the BadgeBadger folder there too if you want a clean slate.