Sampras

A lightweight macOS menu bar app for monitoring and launching local development servers.

What it does

Sampras lives in your menu bar and gives you at-a-glance visibility into whether your local backend and frontend servers are running. It polls a set of predefined ports every few seconds and shows you which ones are active, which process is running on each, and lets you start or stop servers with a single click — without ever opening a terminal.

Features

• Live port monitoring — watches backend ports (8000–8005) and frontend ports (5173–5178) and updates the menu bar icon to reflect the current state
• Process identification — detects which project is running on each port and displays its name in the menu
• One-click start/stop — start a server by selecting it from a discovered list of local projects; stop it just as easily
• Auto app discovery — scans your home directory for projects with a Python/uvicorn backend or a Node/Vite frontend and surfaces them as launch options
• Failure detection — when a server exits unexpectedly, Sampras captures the exit code and the last 20 lines of its log, displays them in an alert, and marks the port as failed in the menu
• Log access — open the log file for any running server directly from the menu
• Open in browser — a submenu lists all active apps (frontend and backend) so you can open any of them in your default browser

The monitored ports and discovery logic can be tailored to track any apps running on those ports — making Sampras adaptable to your own local development setup.

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonnet) or later
• Backend apps: Python project with a venv containing uvicorn
• Frontend apps: Node project with a frontend/package.json and npm run dev support

Building

Requires XcodeGen.

xcodegen generate
./build.sh

This builds the app and installs it to ~/Applications/Sampras.app.