Democracy Defender Mod Manager

Your mods. Your democracy. Defended.

Works with: AyakaMods · Nexus Mods · ModWorkshop · GameBanana · GitHub · any direct link

Docs: https://katsyk.github.io/DemocracyDefenderModManager/

DDMM is a source-neutral mod manager for Helldivers 2: install mods from any site, a direct download link, an archive, or a plain folder — no site is privileged, and no account with any mod site is ever required.

Made with love for the AyakaMods community ❤️ — one of the best homes for Helldivers 2 modding, and proudly DDMM's first-class citizen. Say hi to AyakaMods.

The DDMM Promise

Every Helldiver takes an oath. This one's ours.

• Every mod is welcome. DDMM will never block, blacklist, or rank mods or mod sites.
• No account, anywhere. No mod site's login or credentials are ever asked for.
• Your files, your choice. Your mods live in a folder you control.
• Open source, forever. Apache-2.0, today and always.
• Updates on your terms. Update checks never run unless you ask: click Check for Updates, or turn on automatic checks in Settings.

Source-neutral by design

Mods from any site — AyakaMods, Nexus Mods, ModWorkshop, GameBanana, GitHub, or a direct download link — or from a local archive or a plain folder, are all first-class.

Concretely, that means:

• Any archive (.zip, .7z, .rar) can be added regardless of where it came from.
• Plain folders can be added directly, with no archive step, via "Add Folder" or by dragging a folder in.
• Direct download links can be added via "Add URL" — the manager downloads the archive itself.
• Login-gated sites (AyakaMods, Nexus Mods) never have their credentials asked for or stored. Pasting a mod page link from one of these instead opens it in your browser and watches your Downloads folder for the finished file, installing it automatically once it lands — the same "browser handoff" also kicks in for any other site whose link doesn't serve a downloadable archive directly.
• Where a mod came from is tracked without ever assuming or requiring a particular site.
• Archive extraction is hardened against path traversal and symlink entries: every entry is validated before extraction, and the result is double-checked afterward, regardless of which site an archive came from.

The Sources manifest field

A mod's manifest.json may declare an optional, provider-neutral Sources array. Each entry names a Provider (well-known values are ayakamods, nexus, modworkshop, github, and gamebanana, but any other site name is accepted) and either an Id (used to build that provider's normal mod-page URL) or an explicit Url (which always takes precedence over the generated one):

{
  "Version": 2,
  "Guid": "...",
  "Name": "Example Mod",
  "Description": "...",
  "Sources": [
    { "Provider": "ayakamods", "Id": "4084", "Version": "2026-09-24" },
    { "Provider": "nexus", "Id": "123" },
    { "Provider": "github", "Id": "someone/example-mod" },
    { "Provider": "coolmodsite", "Url": "https://coolmodsite.example/mods/example" }
  ]
}

These show up as "Open on " entries in a mod's menu in the manager.

The legacy NexusData field ({ "ModId": ..., "Version": "..." }) is still read for backwards compatibility and is automatically treated as an additional nexus source — old manifests keep working unchanged, and existing NexusData is never removed or rewritten.

The .hd2mm-origin.json sidecar

When a mod is installed from a direct URL, or through a browser handoff, the manager records that install origin in a small .hd2mm-origin.json file next to the mod's own manifest.json — it never edits or overwrites the mod author's manifest. The filename keeps its original hd2mm prefix for compatibility with manifests and tooling written against it; it isn't user-visible and renaming it would just be churn. It looks like:

{
  "Sources": [
    { "Provider": "url", "Url": "https://example.com/downloads/example-mod.zip" }
  ],
  "InstalledAt": 1745020800
}

This is purely local bookkeeping so the manager can show where a mod was fetched from; it's safe to delete and has no effect on how the mod itself works.

Installing / building

Prerequisites: pnpm, a stable Rust toolchain, and (Linux only) the Tauri system dependencies:

sudo apt install -y libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev

Then:

pnpm install
pnpm tauri build

For local development, pnpm tauri dev runs the app with hot reload. The built binary is named ddmm (ddmm.exe on Windows).

Credits & license

DDMM is derived from Helldivers 2 Mod Manager by teutinsa (https://github.com/teutinsa/Helldivers2ModManager), licensed under Apache-2.0.

Original project: https://teutinsa.github.io/hd2mm-site · support the original author: https://ko-fi.com/teutinsa