Run more than one project locally and your machine becomes a server you never agreed to administer: background dev processes you forgot to kill, ports that collide, /etc/hosts edited by hand, self-signed certs the browser hates, and a reverse proxy to babysit — times every project you own.

PortBay owns all of that. Each project is a declarative record — a hostname, a start command, a port — and the app reconciles reality to match. Stop the app and everything stops. Restart one project and the others don't notice.

• 📂 Point it at a folder — it already knows the project. PortBay reads the framework (Next.js, Vite, Node, PHP, Laravel) and fills in the start command, port, hostname, and HTTPS. Nothing to configure before the first run.
• ▶️ One-click Play / Stop per project — Next.js, Vite, plain Node, PHP, Laravel.
• 🛑 A universal Stop-All that works even after a crash.
• 🔒 Real HTTPS like https://myproject.test, issued and trusted locally.
• 🌐 Wildcard .test routing via a bundled DNS resolver — zero hosts-file edits.
• 🧭 Reverse-proxy routing managed for you through Caddy's admin API.
• 🧪 A sandboxed runner — run an untrusted or freshly-cloned project inside a macOS sandbox, inspect it, then promote it to a normal local run.
• 🤖 An MCP server — drive your whole local stack from Claude Code, Cursor, or Zed; PortBay's projects and actions become 69 agent tools.
• 🗂️ A task board your AI agents work — every project gets a Kanban board; cards are Markdown in your repo. Move one to To Do and the agent you assigned does the work and leaves a handoff for the next run.
• 🧠 A managed local AI server — PortBay installs and supervises Ollama, pulls models from the live catalog, and points dictation, agents, and your own tools at one local endpoint. Models and prompts never leave your Mac.
• 🎙️ Speech-to-Text — hold Fn 🌐 and talk: an on-device speech model plus a local AI rewrite turn spoken thoughts into clean cards, commits, and prompts — in any app on your Mac, not just PortBay. ⌘Z always restores your exact words.
• 🖥️ A built-in SSH workspace — saved hosts, an interactive terminal, an SFTP file browser with inline editing, and port-forward tunnels for the servers your projects ship to.
• 📜 Live logs, status, and metrics per project, plus a macOS menu-bar mode.
• 📦 Already on Herd, ServBay, or MAMP? Import your existing sites in one step.

Native and small by design — target under ~80 MB idle RAM and a sub-30 MB installer. The GUI — and your AI agent — are thin clients over a Rust core with full CLI parity.

Working with a coding agent is still a part-time job: explain the task, watch it run, repeat — and the context dies with the session. In PortBay you write a card instead. Move it to To Do and the agent you assigned picks it up, does the work on your machine, and appends a handoff brief the next run reads first. PortBay launches the coding agents you already have installed — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Aider, Copilot, and more — it never runs a model of its own.

_{One board per project. Cards are Markdown files in the repo — they version with your code.}

If you live in PHP on macOS, Herd is excellent. PortBay's bet is one open, lightweight tool for mixed Node/PHP/static stacks — where the agent doesn't just inspect your environment, it picks up the next card and works it.

Community is fully usable offline with no account, and is never crippled to upsell Pro. Features marked planned are not built yet.

• portbay — the open-source Community app (AGPL-3.0). Start here.

PortBay is early and open — the best time to shape it.

• ⭐ Star portbay; it genuinely helps it reach other developers.
• 💬 Ask & propose in Discussions.
• 🐛 File bugs / ideas via issues (templates guide you).
• 🔧 Send a PR — and earn it back. A merged qualifying pull request grants a perpetual Pro license tied to your GitHub account. Pay with code, not money.
• 🔒 Security issue? Report privately per SECURITY.md — never a public issue.

New here? Read CONTRIBUTING.md, sign off your commits (git commit -s), and look for good first issue labels.