BlackBar

⚠️ Independent third-party tool — not affiliated with Blacksmith. "Blacksmith" and the Blacksmith logo are trademarks of their respective owners. BlackBar is a personal project that talks to the Blacksmith status feed and dashboard the same way your browser does.

A tiny native macOS menu bar app that watches your Blacksmith CI runners and the public Blacksmith status page — so you know before the queue burns whether to merge, re-run, or take a walk.

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That's all it is. A green dot, a vCPU number, a tiny graph. No dock icon. No electron. No telemetry. No servers in between.

What it shows

• Public status from status.blacksmith.sh/summary.json — green when the forge is hot, orange when a region's wobbling.
• Active vCPU totalled across your live runs (parses runner labels like blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404).
• Active job count with the per-job names visible in the dropdown.
• Platform breakdown for amd64, arm64, and macos when per-job detail isn't available.
• 18-bar history graph of recent activity, crammed into 54 pixels next to the count.

Install

Grab the latest signed, notarized build:

Download BlackBar-<version>.zip from Releases, unzip, and drag BlackBar.app to /Applications.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/steipete/BlackBar.git
cd BlackBar && make app
open build/BlackBar.app

BlackBar is a menu bar app — it does not show a Dock icon.

Login

1. Launch BlackBar.
2. Click the menu bar item.
3. Choose Login with GitHub.
4. Complete the regular Blacksmith login in the WebKit window that appears.

The Blacksmith session cookie is stored in the macOS Keychain. After launch the cookie is cached in memory so polling doesn't keep re-prompting Keychain. Sign out wipes it.

Settings

Defaults:

Setting	Default
Organization	openclaw
Repository filter	(empty — all visible org usage)
Refresh interval	60s

Use Settings… from the menu to change the org, an optional repo filter, or the polling interval.

How it works

Two endpoints, one Keychain entry, zero proxies.

                    ┌──────────────────────────┐
       (no auth) ──▶│  status.blacksmith.sh    │── public status feed
                    └──────────────────────────┘
                                 ▲
                                 │
   ┌───────────────┐             │             ┌──────────────────────────┐
   │  BlackBar.app │─────────────┼────────────▶│  app.blacksmith.sh       │
   │   (menu bar)  │   Keychain  │   cookie    │  (your dashboard)        │
   └───────────────┘             │             └──────────────────────────┘
                                 ▼
                          0 third-party SDKs
                          0 telemetry endpoints
                          0 background sync to anywhere else

Develop

Requirements: macOS 14+, Swift 6 toolchain.

make build         # swift build -c release
make app           # build + assemble BlackBar.app bundle
make run           # build + open BlackBar.app
make ci            # local CI-equivalent check

Source layout:

• Sources/BlackBar/ — the AppKit app (status item, menu controller, models).
• Sources/BlackBar/Blacksmith*Client.swift — the two HTTP clients.
• Resources/Info.plist + Assets/ — bundle metadata and icon.
• docs/ — the site at black.bar.

Release

BlackBar uses the same Sparkle release shape as the rest of the openclaw toolchain.

File	Owns
version.env	MARKETING_VERSION and BUILD_NUMBER
CHANGELOG.md	release notes
appcast.xml	Sparkle feed (signed)
Resources/Info.plist	Sparkle public ed25519 key

Pipeline scripts under Scripts/:

• package_app.sh — builds the .app, embeds Sparkle, writes release metadata.
• codesign_app.sh — signs the bundle, nested Sparkle framework, updater, and XPC services.
• sign-and-notarize.sh — builds, signs, notarizes, staples, zips.
• release.sh — tags, publishes the GitHub release, uploads app + dSYM zips, updates appcast.xml, verifies enclosure length and ed25519 signature.
• verify_appcast.sh — appcast sanity check.
• test_live_update.sh — smoke-tests an update from the previous release.

Required release env:

export APP_STORE_CONNECT_API_KEY_P8='...'
export APP_STORE_CONNECT_KEY_ID='...'
export APP_STORE_CONNECT_ISSUER_ID='...'
export SPARKLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE=/path/to/sparkle-ed25519.key

Cut a release:

make release

Replace the Unreleased date in CHANGELOG.md with the release date before running.

Privacy

BlackBar talks to two hosts only:

1. status.blacksmith.sh — public status feed.
2. app.blacksmith.sh — your Blacksmith dashboard, with your Blacksmith session cookie.

That's the whole network surface. No analytics. No crash reporters. No "home base" callbacks. The source is right here — read it.

Trademark notice

"Blacksmith" is a trademark of its respective owner. BlackBar is an independent third-party tool that interoperates with Blacksmith's public status feed and signed-in dashboard. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Blacksmith.

If you're the Blacksmith team and you'd rather we change the name, drop a note at steipete@gmail.com or open an issue.

License

MIT © Peter Steinberger.