I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

1. portless

   1 7 10,377 9.1 TypeScript

   Replace port numbers with stable, named local URLs. For humans and agents.

   

   This is really amusing. Because absolutly eveyrone I know vibe-coded this thing. I think the first one was https://github.com/ralt/dns-to-port possibly mine is second (but it is very much a joke so I am not linking it) .. Vercel later did https://github.com/vercel-labs/portless and I would imagine quite a few others. Zeitgeist. Also this does probably mean its kinda useful.

   And that none of us can get bothered to "Google" if a thing that does the same thing already exists. Currently vibing, on a train, a spaced repetition thing for my kid - because I needed a specific list of countries - and its faster to create the whole app rather than figure-out how to find one that would do this.

2. SaaSHub

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3. localias

   2 8 1,454 5.4 Go

   custom local domain aliases for local dev servers

   

   I like localias[1] for this problem. Not only do you get nice aliases for all your local ports, but you also get nice Caddy-managed TLS certs for them

   [1]: https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

4. portmap

   3 1 13 - Rust

   map names to localhost ports, made for agents and humans

   

   I’ve built portmap[0] to solve that. Also comes with skills which makes it work really great with coding agents (instructions in the readme).

   [0] https://github.com/JonasKs/portmap

5. dns-to-port

   4 1 1 - Go

   A small utility so that my localhost apps are more user-friendly to use

   

   This is really amusing. Because absolutly eveyrone I know vibe-coded this thing. I think the first one was https://github.com/ralt/dns-to-port possibly mine is second (but it is very much a joke so I am not linking it) .. Vercel later did https://github.com/vercel-labs/portless and I would imagine quite a few others. Zeitgeist. Also this does probably mean its kinda useful.

   And that none of us can get bothered to "Google" if a thing that does the same thing already exists. Currently vibing, on a train, a spaced repetition thing for my kid - because I needed a specific list of countries - and its faster to create the whole app rather than figure-out how to find one that would do this.

6. mod_bonjour

   5 1 0 - C

   

   I've used[0] `.local` to achieve something like this, by advertising service endpoints over mDNS.

   Exposing random services to your local network is exactly what mDNS is for, I always thought it was a shame more dev tooling didn't do that.

   [0]: https://github.com/andrewaylett/mod_bonjour is a fork of Apple's mod_bonjour, very much unloved of late I'm afraid.

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