Orbit

Orbit is a TUI to launch, control and monitor local development services: processes (backends, frontends, workers), Docker containers and docker compose services. It is built with TypeScript, Bun and OpenTUI (@opentui/react), and configured through a single orbit.yaml file.

 ◉ orbit · demo     1 Dashboard  2 Graph  3 Logs                                ● 7 up  ○ 1
╭─ Services 7/8 ───────────╮╭─ Dependency graph · 7/8 up ────────────────────────────────────╮
│ ● postgres       :55432  ││                               ╭────────────────────╮           │
│ ● redis          :56379  ││                         ╭────▶│ ● auth             ├────╮      │
│ ● auth           :4300   ││ ╭────────────────────╮  │     │ healthy :4300 40M  │    │      │
│▌● api            :4100   ││ │ ● postgres         ├──┤     ╰────────────────────╯    │      │
│ ● worker                 ││ │ healthy :55432 19M │  │                               │      │
│ ● web            :4200   ││ ╰────────────────────╯  │                               │  ... │

The problem

Running a local stack usually means juggling many terminals: a database container, a backend, a frontend, a worker, each one depending on another. Starting them in the wrong order, leaving orphaned processes hogging ports, or not knowing which one failed makes the day-to-day painful.

What it does

Dependency graph. Services are laid out by layers and colored by status; selecting a node highlights its dependencies and its dependents. Navigable with keyboard and mouse.
Ordered startup and shutdown. start brings up dependencies first and waits until they are ready; stop stops dependents first.
Healthchecks. HTTP, TCP, command, or Docker’s HEALTHCHECK.
Restart policy. no, on-failure or always, with exponential backoff.
Live logs. Per service or combined, with colored prefixes, regex filter or search (highlight while keeping all lines), scrolling, timestamps and error/warning highlighting. Long lines wrap, the view stays put while you scroll up, and a copy mode selects whole lines and copies them via OSC 52 or the system clipboard. Logs can also be exported to a file.
CPU and memory metrics. Per process tree (via /proc) and per container (docker stats), shown as sparklines.
Docker and compose. Imports docker-compose.yml automatically (including depends_on, ports, healthchecks and variable interpolation) and re-attaches to containers that were already running; those are not stopped when exiting Orbit unless you ask for it.
Detach and resume. On quit you choose between stopping everything or leaving services running. Detached processes keep their own process group and write their logs to disk; the next orbit re-attaches with status, logs, metrics and controls, and orbit down stops them from outside.
Environment variables. Global and per-service env and env_file (with optional files), ${VAR:-def} interpolation, files re-read on every restart, and a view of each service’s environment with secrets masked.
One-shot tasks. Builds, migrations or provisioning steps count as ready once they finish successfully.
Robust process handling. Detects occupied ports before starting and kills entire process trees, so no orphaned vite or esbuild processes are left behind.
Command palette with fuzzy search, service groups, and open-in-browser.
Themes. Eleven built-in themes (Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Dracula, Nord, Gruvbox, Rosé Pine, One Dark…) switchable live, plus custom JSON themes that extend a built-in one.
lazygit integration. Open a service’s git repository in lazygit and come back to Orbit with the services still running.

Usage

Published on npm as @jgoterris/orbit: run it with bunx @jgoterris/orbit, or install it globally. It also offers non-TUI commands (up, down, graph, ls, and logs with -f, --grep and --since) and orbit init, which generates an orbit.yaml by scanning the project.

Status

Personal open-source tool released under the MIT license. The codebase is covered by tests for the config, the dependency graph, the supervisor (with real processes) and the TUI.