Building Localwork

I have a bad habit of starting projects faster than I document them.

One project lives on port 3001. Another depends on an LLM running somewhere else. A third is hosted online, while a fourth only works when a specific local service is running. Eventually, finding the right URL—or remembering which port is free—becomes a project of its own.

That’s why I built Localwork.

Localwork is a personal command center for all of my web projects. Each project gets its own dossier with a name, description, thumbnail, URLs, ports, IP addresses, locations, repositories, notes, tags and linked services.

The goal is simple: one place to see everything I’m building and how it connects.

The dashboard has a mission-control interface with project tiles, a network registry and light/dark themes. Local projects can be configured with their project folder and start command, so they can be launched directly from the dashboard. Hosted projects remain simple links.

The port-management side became especially important. A local project might use port 3001, while an associated API, database, worker or LLM uses several others. Keeping those details in one shared registry makes conflicts much easier to avoid.

The project also taught me an important lesson about persistence. My first version stored everything in browser local storage. That worked for a few small records, but uploaded thumbnails and thirteen project dossiers eventually exposed its limits. The dashboard now uses a proper local browser database instead, with the older storage retained only as a fallback.

I also had to solve a very practical problem: the dashboard itself needs to stay available. At one point, another project took over port 3001, which made it appear as if Localwork had disappeared. The final setup gives the dashboard a reserved port and moves other projects elsewhere—for example, Localwork on port 3001 and Image Powerhouse on port 3000... never mind the odd naming, they are local projects that never see the light of day ;)

Localwork is still a personal tool, but it has become one of the most useful projects I’ve built. It reduces the mental overhead of remembering where everything lives, which services it needs and how to start it.

It is less like a bookmarks page and more like a small operations room for my entire local development environment.