Skip to main content
John Munn

Dev Process Tracker (`devpt`): Local Service Orchestration for Multi-Stack Development

A macOS-first Go CLI/TUI for discovering, tracking, and controlling local development services across Node, Python, and Go workflows. `devpt` unifies process visibility, lifecycle controls, health checks, logs, and crash diagnostics in one place.

Dev Process Tracker (`devpt`): Local Service Orchestration for Multi-Stack Development
active
Go
CLI
TUI
Developer Tooling
Process Management
Links:View Code (opens in new tab)

Dev Process Tracker (devpt) is a local operations tool for developers running mixed stacks. It gives you one surface to see what is running, what is registered, what is healthy, and what crashed, without juggling ad-hoc shell scripts and terminal tabs.

The project is built in Go with a command-line interface and an interactive Bubble Tea TUI.

What it does

devpt is designed around day-to-day local development control loops:

  • Discovery + inventory: scans local listening services and shows name, port, PID, project root, source, and status
  • Managed service registry: register services with add and control them with start, stop, restart, and remove
  • Unified monitoring UI: opens a TUI by default with list views, filtering, sorting, log view, and command mode
  • Health + status checks: surfaces health information for running services and richer status output for managed ones
  • Logs and crash diagnostics: captures service logs, marks managed services as crashed, and infers likely crash reasons
  • AI-agent-aware process source tagging: detects likely agent-started services (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) and labels source context

How it’s implemented

The architecture is modular and intentionally small:

  • pkg/scanner: process and port discovery (lsof/ps integration), project-root resolution, source tagging heuristics
  • pkg/registry: JSON-backed managed service registry under ~/.config/devpt/registry.json
  • pkg/process: process lifecycle management, signal handling, PID tracking, and log capture
  • pkg/health: health check evaluation for managed/running services
  • pkg/cli: command handlers plus Bubble Tea TUI interactions and keymaps

The result is a single local binary (go build -o devpt ./cmd/devpt) with no external service dependency.

Why this project matters

Local development environments are often the first place delivery friction appears: orphaned processes, unclear ownership, broken restarts, and invisible crashes. devpt makes that operational state explicit, which shortens debug loops and improves reliability during active development.

It also reflects a broader engineering principle I care about: operational clarity should exist before production. If teams can’t reason about process state locally, they won’t reason about it confidently at scale.