Noodles

A visual Node.js dev server manager for macOS. Lives in your menu bar, shows what's running, and lets you kill it.

What it does

Noodles monitors your local dev servers and displays them in a compact popover from the menu bar.

• Auto-detects running servers by scanning listening ports (node, bun, deno, vite, next-server)
• Port badges -- click any port number to open localhost in your browser
• Kill process trees -- stop a server and all its child processes
• View logs -- reads from ~/.cache/noodles/logs/ when using the companion ndev shell function
• Reveal terminal -- jump to the terminal window that spawned the server
• Remembers projects -- previously seen servers stay in the list as stopped entries
• Launch on login -- optional, via macOS Login Items
• Menu bar icon -- a 2x2 dot grid where dots light up green for each running server

Install

Download the latest DMG from Releases.

Build from source

Requirements

• macOS 13.0+
• Xcode 15+

Steps

git clone https://github.com/danielhowells/noodles.git
cd noodles
open app/Noodles.xcodeproj

Build and run from Xcode (Cmd+R), or use the build script for a signed and notarized release:

./scripts/build.sh

The build script archives, signs with Developer ID, notarizes with Apple, and produces a DMG in build/.

Optional: ndev shell function

Noodles can display dev server logs if you start servers with the included ndev Fish function. It wraps your package manager's dev script and tees output to ~/.cache/noodles/logs/.

# Add to your Fish config
source /path/to/noodles/ndev.fish

# Then instead of `npm run dev`:
ndev

Project structure

noodles/
  app/              # Swift macOS app (Xcode project)
  site/             # Marketing site (Next.js)
  scripts/          # Build and distribution scripts
  build/            # Build artifacts (DMG, xcarchive)

License

MIT