portbook

shipped

Six dev servers running on six random ports and no idea which is which. Portbook finds them, labels them, and gives you one page to click through — or one terminal command to list them.

2025-12 – Present

Rust
axum
lsof
ss
SSE

A local-only Rust CLI + web UI that auto-discovers HTTP servers on every non-standard localhost port, labels each card by project name (detected from process cwd markers) and page title, and classifies ports as live / error / dead with visible reasons.

Why it exists

The default developer experience for multi-server local setups is keeping a mental map of which port is which project. Portbook is what happens when you decide that's a bug.

What's nice about the implementation

One typed data model, multiple peer surfaces. Web UI (SSE), terminal ls (colored grouped output), TUI (filter + expand row), and watch --json for agents and scripts. None of them derive from each other.
Single static binary, ~5 MB. No runtime dependencies beyond lsof (macOS) or ss (Linux).
Stable JSON schema at /api/ports, ls --json, and watch --json — same shape everywhere, so scripts don't break when the UI evolves.
portbook explain <port> prints a paste-ready diagnostic block (probe URL, elapsed time, error class, attempts) for filing issues when a port is misclassified.