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DevServers wiki: non-obvious decisions only.

Each page covers one thing. Load the page you need; skip the rest.

Architecture

• Spawn Flow: why the dashboard owns the entire spawn lifecycle, the state machine, where the toast lives, Start-vs-Restart detection.
• Menu Bar: the unload-per-run lifecycle, snapshot cache, poke pattern, and why starts route through the dashboard.
• Paths: every user-supplied path must be canonicalized.
• Process Detection: how we know what's running; cross-platform port plan.

Implementation

• Spawn Primitives: zsh -ilc, detached spawn, SIGKILL, kill-then-spawn order, argv-not-interpolation.
• Script Picker: how pickDevScript decides which script to run.
• Framework Detection: two detection paths (live process vs package.json) and the tag label/color styling.
• Favicons: detection order, CORS/data-URI inlining, the two-tier (port + cwd) cache.
• Recents: LocalStorage layer, write points, favicon caching, passive migration.
• Shopify Integration: running-server detection, theme and app start support, the 9292 port fallback, and Shopify-specific follow-ups.

Things to know

• Raycast Quirks: bugs and gotchas in Raycast itself, with workarounds.
• Portless: custom domain integration, and why a wrapped dev script needs the proxy already running.
• UI Conventions: shortcuts, panel ordering.

History

• Cleanups: code we deleted and why. Find a removed helper here before re-implementing it.
• Roadmap: what's planned next.