Introduction

Hallway is the front door for everything you vibe-coded on a random port. It is a small, always-on, local-only service for your own machine. It keeps a live directory of every web server you run locally:

• the long-lived ones you installed on purpose,
• the ad-hoc ones a coding agent started in a session that has since ended,
• and the unidentified ones it finds simply by looking at what is listening.

It shows them on one calm dashboard with their health, uptime history and a thumbnail, and doubles as a personal jumping-off page of bookmarks to the remote things you always forget the URL of, and it can start a dev server as a native OS service so it outlives the session (and, if you ask, comes back after a reboot). If you want, it gives each app a memorable HTTPS hostname too (slides.localhost instead of a port number nobody remembers).

What’s released

Hallway is on npm: see Installation. Each feature on this site is marked with the milestone it belongs to (v0, v1, v2), and all three have shipped. What’s left is checking everything on a real Mac: see the roadmap.

The problem

Coding agents have made small web apps nearly free to build: a dashboard for some data, a slide deck, a log viewer, an internal tool. Each is an HTTP server on some port, and the way it gets started is the root of the mess:

1. A coding-agent session (or a terminal tab) runs npm run dev, vite, astro dev, next dev, python -m http.server or similar.
2. The server keeps running after the session ends. It is now parented to nothing you can see.
3. Days later you can’t remember that it exists, which port it is on, which project it belongs to, or what started it.
4. A reboot kills it. Nothing restarts it. You find out when you next go looking.

This is not hypothetical. One developer found six dev servers on ports 4321, 4455, 4666, 4670, 4671 and 7333, one to two weeks old. Three had command lines like node dist/index.js that said nothing; three were the same dashboard running from three git worktrees, two of them pushed off its hardcoded port by hand. Then a reboot killed all six, and nobody noticed for two days. By then there was no record of what had been running, so nothing could say what was lost.

There is a second, related need: one page that links to the remote things you visit but never remember the URL of, such as production admin consoles, BI dashboards and status pages. On a home network a home-lab dashboard does that. There is no equivalent for “my laptop”.

What makes it different

Plenty of dashboards show tiles and bookmarks. Hallway’s differences:

1. It populates itself. It reads registries and scans for listeners, so the page reflects reality without anyone maintaining a config. Every hand-maintained dashboard recreates the original problem.
2. It remembers. It records what it saw while processes were alive, so after a reboot it can say what was lost (Lost at last reboot).
3. It fronts, if you ask it to. Memorable HTTPS hostnames per app, with defaults that need no DNS server.
4. It keeps things alive. Native launchd (macOS), systemd user (Linux) or scheduled-task (Windows) services, no extra process manager.
5. It is built for agent-spawned servers. Plain YAML an agent can edit, an agent guide, an MCP server, and one command, hallway run, that starts a server so it never becomes an orphan.

What shipped when

• v0 The front page, released in 0.1.0 for macOS and Linux. The daemon, the dashboard at http://localhost:4255, YAML config with live updates, health checks with 24-hour uptime bars (7- and 90-day views in the drawer), the port scanner with claim and ignore, bookmarks, favicon tiles, the agent guide, hallway doctor for the daemon and data, and running Hallway itself as a login service. Links go to http://localhost:<port>. No sudo, no DNS, no proxy.
• v1 Fronting and services, released in 0.1.0 to 0.3.0. hallway run, stop, start, restart and logs, managed services for apps (launchd or systemd user units) and log rotation; fronted mode (Caddy with HTTPS on *.localhost, hallway setup and teardown, networking checks in hallway doctor, the fallback page); custom domains such as myname.internal; and Lost at last reboot.
• v2 Agents and polish, released in 0.2.0 and 0.3.0: the MCP server, the optional dev-server hook, opt-in screenshot thumbnails, generated cards, and a fast 90-day uptime view with a latency chart. What’s left is running every criterion on a real Mac.
• Windows, best effort, released in 0.4.0 (the daemon, dashboard and port scanner) and 0.5.0 (managed services as scheduled tasks). Everything but fronted mode, checked on CI’s Windows runners but not yet on a real Windows desktop. See the roadmap.

Who it’s for

One developer, on their own machine, running many small local web servers, especially one who leans on coding agents. On macOS or Linux, or on Windows without the HTTPS names. Comfortable with a CLI and with editing YAML; not interested in maintaining a hand-written dashboard config. Hallway is not for teams, remote access, production process management or containers.

Quickstart The first five minutes.

Apps Declared, discovered and observed: where apps come from.

For agents Files first, hallway run, and MCP.

Why the name From Spaghetti Junction to a calm, well-lit hallway.