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 (8000–8002) 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
• Log access — open the log file for any running server directly from the menu
• Open in browser — launch the active frontend in your default browser in one click

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.