Introducing bwu_redux_devtools: A Redux DevTools GUI for Rust

2026-07-18

Filed under: Announcements

Tree view color-coding added, removed, and changed state between actions

Following bwu_redux out the door, we've now open sourced bwu_redux_devtools — the Redux DevTools GUI and gRPC server we built to inspect bwu_redux stores, published on GitHub under a dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license.

What it does

Connected apps stream every dispatched action and the resulting state to the DevTools server. The GUI shows the action history per app and lets you inspect any recorded state as a collapsible tree, JSON, or RON. The tree view — shown above — color-codes what changed since the previous action (added, removed, changed), with a toggle to hide everything that didn't change, so a large state doesn't bury the one field you actually care about.

It's built with Dioxus, the same GUI framework as BWU Designer, and runs as both a desktop app and a web GUI.

Not on crates.io yet

Unlike bwu_redux itself, this crate isn't published to crates.io: it depends on the official Dioxus components, whose dioxus-primitives crate is currently only available as a git dependency, not a published release. Once that lands upstream, we'll publish here too. Until then, install straight from GitHub:

# Desktop GUI (embeds the DevTools gRPC server)
cargo install --git https://github.com/BeWellUp/bwu_redux_devtools --bin bwu_redux_devtools

# Headless gRPC server only (e.g. to serve the web GUI)
cargo install --git https://github.com/BeWellUp/bwu_redux_devtools --bin bwu_redux_devtools_server --features standalone-server

Connecting an app

Enable devtools on the store config in the app you want to inspect — this needs the redux_devtools feature of bwu_redux, which is on by default:

let config = StoreConfig::new(initial_state, reducer)
    .with_devtools(true)
    .with_app_name("my-app");

Start the DevTools GUI, then your app; it appears in the sidebar and its action history fills in live.

An MCP interface, for free

With the mcp feature enabled, the same server also serves an MCP endpoint alongside its usual gRPC one — no separate binary or process. That means an AI agent — Claude Code, for instance — can inspect a connected app's live Redux state directly: list connected apps, pull an app's action/state history, read its current state, or pause forwarding for noisy actions. For us, that turned out to be a genuinely useful way to let an agent debug state issues in BWU Designer without us relaying screenshots back and forth.

Try it

Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. If you're already using bwu_redux, this is the other half of the picture — go give it a try.