Portless Gives Local Dev Services Stable .localhost URLs, Hits 12K GitHub Stars

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Portless is a developer tool that replaces numbered localhost ports with stable, named URLs such as https://myapp.localhost, making local service addressing more predictable. It works as a reverse proxy on port 443, automatically assigning ports, handling TLS certificates, and injecting framework-specific CLI flags so services bind correctly without manual setup. The tool is particularly useful for AI agent workflows, where agents cannot reliably track dynamic port assignments across service restarts. Portless detects popular frameworks like Vite, Astro, and Angular that do not respect the PORT environment variable and injects the appropriate flags automatically. The project gained 12,000 GitHub stars within days of release and reached the number three spot on TypeScript trending repositories.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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