Portside app icon

Portside

Your localhost, in the menu bar.

A free, open-source macOS menu bar app that lists every dev server running on your Mac, kills the one hogging a port in one click, and opens any of them on your phone with a QR code.

Free · Open source (MIT) · macOS 14+ · No accounts, no telemetry

Why Portside

Three rituals every web developer knows: EADDRINUSE, fighting local IPs to test on a phone, and not knowing what's even running. Portside owns all three.

📡

See everything running

Every listening port, with the project behind it — read straight from package.json and friends — framework, uptime, and memory. Dev servers up front, system daemons tucked away.

⛔️

Kill it in one click

Graceful SIGTERM first, SIGKILL only if the process won't go. No more lsof -i :3000 followed by kill -9.

📱

Open it on your phone

One click shows a QR code that opens the server from any device on your Wi-Fi — including servers bound to 127.0.0.1 only, bridged by a built-in relay. No ngrok, no local-IP hunting.

🗂️

A real dashboard, too

A resizable window with every server, a filter field, and always-visible actions — alongside the menu-bar popover for a quick glance.

🔒

Boring, safe permissions

Everything is lsof, ps, Unix signals, and a plain TCP listener — no kernel extensions, no Accessibility access, no accounts.

🧩

Open source

The complete source is in this repo under MIT. Read it, audit it, or build it yourself in under a minute.

How sharing works

Your phone can't reach 127.0.0.1:3000 on your Mac, and most dev servers bind only to loopback. Portside starts a tiny relay that listens on your LAN address and pipes bytes to the loopback port — a dumb, fast TCP pipe, so HTTP, WebSockets, and streaming all just work.

Stop sharing and the relay is gone. Nothing about your dev setup has to change to make this work.

Install in two minutes

Portside isn't notarized by Apple yet, so first launch takes one extra step.

Homebrew user? brew install --cask aadhilfarhan/tap/portside — then skip to step 2.

Download and drag to Applications

Get the latest .dmg, open it, and drag Portside into Applications.

Allow the app to open

Double-click Portside, dismiss the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. One time only.

Start using it

The Portside icon appears in your menu bar. Click it for the quick list, or open the full dashboard for search and richer detail on every server.

Prefer to compile it yourself? Build from source in under a minute — no Xcode needed.