A Port Number Is Not an Identity
Earlier this week, I opened a small Mac app I had built for myself and found at least 12 local development servers still running. I had been moving quickly among projects, worktrees, terminals, and AI coding tools. Starting the next local app had become nearly frictionless. Remembering everything I had started had not. The awkward part was not that macOS lacked the information. lsof can show…
A Mac application called Dev Server Activity was created to help developers manage and stop local development servers running on their machines. The app addresses the challenge of identifying which project owns a specific listener, determining whether the listener is still needed, and confirming if the process is the same as when the user decided to stop it.
The app groups listening sockets by process and displays the process context alongside stop controls. It supports common processes such as Node.js, Vite, Next.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, Bun, and Deno. When it cannot establish process identity, it probes a set of common localhost ports, but these results are marked as port-only and cannot be stopped from the app.
The app does not trust its scan results alone and checks the target's current command line and TCP listening sockets before sending a stop signal. The stop options are Normal Stop (SIGTERM) and Force Stop (SIGKILL), which are presented as separate decisions without automated cleanup or decision-making. The app is distributed as a direct download, not through the Mac App Store, due to Mac App Sandbox restrictions.
It is signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarized by Apple, and includes a SHA-256 checksum. The app is open-source under the MIT license and aims to gather feedback on process patterns it might miss or misidentify and whether the provided context is sufficient for confident stop decisions.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
