How Frost works
App window & tray
Frost has no main window. It sits in the menu bar or notification area, and opens a single settings window with configuration on one side and live status on the other.
The tray
Frost's snowflake sits in the macOS menu bar or the Windows/Linux notification area. The icon fills in when Frost is idle and empties while a refresh is running, so a glance tells you whether something is happening. The menu holds:
| Item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Next refresh in 7 hours | Not clickable — when the current token expires, and therefore when Frost will refresh. Updates every 30 seconds. |
| Refresh now | Starts a refresh immediately. Only shown once Frost is configured. |
| Settings… / Get Started | Opens the app window. Reads Get Started until you have saved a start URL. |
| About Frost | Opens this website in your browser. |
| Quit | Stops Frost. Nothing refreshes while it is not running. |
On Windows and Linux a left click on the icon opens the app window directly and the menu is on the right click; on macOS a click opens the menu.
The app window
One window, six pages, split into what you configure and what Frost found:
Login
Connect Frost to your AWS IAM Identity Center.
Closing the window does not quit Frost — it keeps running in the tray. Every page updates live while a refresh runs, except for a form you are in the middle of editing: unsaved changes are never overwritten by an incoming update.
Configuration pages
Login
The SSO start URL and the region your Identity Center lives in — the two things Frost genuinely needs. Saving them clears the current token and starts a fresh refresh. Login settings →
Behavior
Whether Frost opens the login page by itself or notifies you first, where that page opens, and the global refresh hotkey. There is a Test button for notifications, which doubles as the way to grant Frost notification permission on macOS, and a Clear Cookies button that resets the login window's browser state. Behavior settings →
Privacy
How long run history and log files are kept, and a button that erases the history immediately. Privacy settings →
Status pages
Credentials
The state of the current token — active with an expiry time, expired,
refreshing, or failed with the exact error — and a Refresh
Now button. Below that, every account you can reach, with its
account id and a badge showing how many permission sets you have in it.
Expand an account to see each permission set alongside the profile name
Frost wrote for it, which is the fastest way to find the name to pass to
--profile.
EKS
The clusters found on the last scan, as a table of cluster, profile and region. Empty until the first refresh completes; if it stays empty, the Activity page shows which regions returned access errors. EKS discovery →
Activity
A list of recent refresh runs, newest first, with status and duration. Open one to see the three steps, the accounts and clusters each found, and the error if it failed. Activity & logs →
Live updates
The window is driven by Frost's own state rather than polled: start a refresh and you can watch the steps appear, the accounts fill in, and the cluster table populate. Two things are deliberately protected from those updates — a form with unsaved edits, and an expanded account or step you are reading — so nothing collapses or reverts under you mid-run.