Local Apps

Self-healing dashboard for a fleet of local dev apps.

Register an app once. Local Apps assigns it a port, writes its Caddy reverse proxy and macOS LaunchAgent, health-checks it every 30 seconds, restarts it when it crashes, and exposes it by name over LAN and Tailscale. One page instead of a wall of npm run dev tabs. Apps you are not using stay parked at zero cost until you start them; the monitor itself is 1 Node process with 2 runtime dependencies.

• One page - live status over SSE, with LAN, Tailscale, and production links, plus a QR code for your phone.
• Zero-config onboarding - POST /api/apps with an id; port, <id>.localhost proxy, and LaunchAgent are provisioned for you.
• Self-healing - a down app walks 5 levels: kickstart, port-kill and reload, log-driven fixes, an optional local AI agent, and a circuit breaker that parks a flapping app instead of looping.
• Multi-machine - a hub runs the bots; agent machines only report status.
• Fails closed off-box - loopback is trusted; any other caller is denied mutations and log reads unless it sends x-local-apps-token.

Node 22 or newer (.nvmrc is set; nvm use picks it up).

git clone https://github.com/bunlongheng/local-apps.git
cd local-apps
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:9875. With no apps.config.json it seeds 2 demo apps. Register your own:

curl -X POST http://localhost:9875/api/apps \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"id":"hello-app","localPath":"/path/to/hello-app"}'

Caddy proxies and LaunchAgents are macOS features (Homebrew Caddy). Elsewhere the dashboard and API run in monitoring mode.

_{Who opens it, the hub process, the host, the apps it supervises, and the L1 to L5 healing ladder. Click through for the interactive version.}

One Node 22 process on node:http, no framework, no build step. server.js serves the vanilla-JS dashboard in public/ and owns the API, backed by SQLite. When an app goes down:

On the hub role only, 5 routes serve the owner's own workflow rather than the product: /api/tab-colors, /api/consistency, /api/app-profiles, /api/icon-sync, /api/capabilities. They read optional local files and repos; on an agent machine they are not registered.