Grapevine

A minimal macOS menubar watcher for GitHub pull requests.
Add the repos you care about, watch their PRs. That is the whole app.
About · Install · Building · Contributing

About

Grapevine lives in the menubar only, with no Dock icon. Clicking the tray icon toggles a popover with the PR list, and clicking away dismisses it. You give it a GitHub token and a list of repos; it polls them every few minutes and shows the open PRs, split into the ones you authored, the ones you are involved in, and everything else. The first two badge comments and reviews you have not seen yet; everything else is a browse list and stays silent. Each row badges the organization's avatar onto the author's, flags drafts with a pill, shows a green check once a PR's required approvals are in, and shows a pill naming what still needs attention (merge conflict, CI failing, changes requested, unresolved threads, or behind base), collapsing the rest into a count when more than one applies. The list is ordered by most recently updated. Merged PRs get their own section until you dismiss them.

Grapevine is inspired by Trailer, which I used for years and still recommend. It is not a fork or a port, and shares no code with it: Trailer is Swift and AppKit, Grapevine is Tauri, Rust and React. Grapevine only reimplements the one slice of Trailer I reached for daily. If you want issues as well as PRs, filtering, notification rules, GitHub Enterprise, or any of this on a phone, Trailer already does all of that well and you should use it instead.

Non-goals

Grapevine deliberately does not, and will not:

• Track issues. Pull requests only.
• Filter, label, sort, or group beyond the three built-in sections.
• Send system notifications. The badge in the menubar is the whole signal.
• Support GitHub Enterprise or anything other than github.com.
• Handle more than one GitHub account at a time.
• Run anywhere other than a Mac menubar. No iOS, no Android, no CLI.
• Ship on the App Store.

Install

Download the Grapevine-<version>-universal.zip asset from the latest release, unzip it, and drag Grapevine.app to /Applications. The build is universal and runs on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

Releases are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the first launch opens normally with no Gatekeeper warning.

Building

Stack

• Tauri v2 shell; hand-written Rust is limited to tray setup and popover window toggling (src-tauri/src/lib.rs)
• React + TypeScript + Vite frontend in the popover window

Prerequisites

• macOS with Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
• mise, which installs the pinned Node and Rust toolchains:

mise install

Development

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Tests

npm test           # frontend
npm run test:rust  # Rust

Production build

npm run tauri build

The runnable app lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/Grapevine.app.

Releasing

Releases are automated with release-please. Merging a Conventional Commit to main updates a standing release PR that bumps the version in package.json and writes CHANGELOG.md; merging that PR tags the release and builds the universal app onto it. package.json is the only place the app version lives, so never bump a version by hand.

Setup

Once the app is running, open the popover and go to settings.

1. Create a personal access token (classic) on GitHub. The "Create one on GitHub" link in settings opens the new-token page with repo pre-ticked and the description prefilled. repo is what covers private repos, but note that it grants read and write access to all of your private repositories; Grapevine only ever reads. If you only watch public repos, public_repo is the tighter choice.
2. Paste the token into settings. Grapevine stores it in the macOS Keychain and never writes it to settings.json. Saving checks the scopes GitHub actually granted: a classic token without repo gets a notice that private repositories won't be visible, but the token still saves.
3. Add repos as owner/name, one at a time.

Fine-grained tokens are not recommended: they are scoped to a single resource owner, and Grapevine holds one token, so a fine-grained token can only ever watch repos belonging to one user or organization.

Contributing

Bug reports and bug-fix pull requests are welcome.

For anything that adds behaviour, open an issue before writing code. Anything on the Non-goals list above is a no by default, and the bar for a new feature is high on purpose: staying small is the point of this app, not an accident of it being young.

License

MIT.