Porter

A menu-bar app for macOS that watches your Downloads folder and quietly files each finished download into the matching folder on your NAS — Pictures, PDFs, Documents, Installers, Movies, Music, Archives, Screenshots, and everything else.

Porter exists because the obvious approach — a launchd job that moves files onto a Finder-mounted SMB share — doesn't reliably work on modern macOS:

• macOS scopes SMB write access to the Aqua GUI session that mounted the share. A launchd-spawned process can read the share but its writes fail.
• launchd's WatchPaths goes silently dead, and StartInterval gets throttled.
• TCC silently blocks a background script from even reading ~/Downloads.

Porter sidesteps all three by being a real menu-bar app that runs in your login session:

• The folder watcher runs in-process (FSEvents), not as a separate LaunchAgent.
• Launch-at-login uses SMAppService.mainApp — a login-item app in the full Aqua session, not a launchd agent — so SMB writes succeed.
• Full Disk Access attaches to the signed app's stable identity (granted once, survives updates) instead of to /bin/bash.
• The menu-bar icon is always-visible status: 🟢 watching · 🔵 sorting · 🟠 NAS not mounted · 🔴 needs access / error. No more silent failures.

Build

cd apps/desktop
swift build          # debug compile
swift test           # unit tests (classification + move mechanics)
swiftlint            # lint
./build.sh           # release build → build/Porter.app  (PORTER_CHANNEL selects channel)
./dev.sh             # build + install "Porter Dev" next to Stable
./make-dmg.sh        # package the channel's DMG

Apple Silicon, macOS 14+. The classification map and move rules are a direct port of the author's bin/sort-downloads script.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE. © Syntax Lab Technology / Abdul Rafay (rafay99.com).