Services

The Services page is the full health surface for everything PortBay runs alongside your projects. The dashboard's compact status row shows the same sidecars at a glance; this page expands each into a card with a status-aware action, the raw detail string, and a "What is this?" expander. Status is polled every 3 seconds; a manual Refresh re-pulls all of them immediately.

The Bundled Sidecars

In critical-path order — the order they'd need to come up in for a project to actually load:

Sidecar	What it does
Process Compose	Spawns your dev servers and tails their logs. Without it, no project can start. Bundled — never resolved from $PATH.
Caddy	The HTTPS edge: terminates local HTTPS for project hostnames (e.g. https://myapp.test) and routes each to its localhost port, or to the project's Nginx or Apache when it uses one. See Caddy and HTTPS and Choosing a web server.
mkcert (local CA)	Installs the locally-trusted certificate authority so your browser accepts .test HTTPS certificates without warnings. See Certificates.
dnsmasq	Wildcard DNS for your domain suffix (*.test → 127.0.0.1). Optional — /etc/hosts entries fall back when it's absent. See Networking & DNS.
Mailpit	Catches outgoing SMTP from local apps so you can inspect emails without sending them. See Mailpit.
Hosts helper	Writes managed entries for each hostname inside the # BEGIN PortBay / # END PortBay block in /etc/hosts. Only touched when dnsmasq isn't routing a given hostname.
Dumps listener	Opt-in loopback listener for dump()/dd() calls, feeding the /dumps viewer. Off by default — enabled from Integrations. Never accepts connections outside 127.0.0.1. See Dumps.

A development build and an installed production build each run their own instance of every sidecar — separate socket paths, LaunchDaemon/service labels, and /etc/hosts marker blocks (# BEGIN PortBay-dev vs # BEGIN PortBay) — so running a dev checkout alongside the installed app never causes the two to clobber each other's state.

Each Card Shows

• Status — running, stopped, or crashed, with PID and uptime where the sidecar is a real child process PortBay supervises.
• A restart action — stop/restart push fresh status immediately instead of waiting on the next poll.
• Logs — Caddy, dnsmasq and Mailpit open the last lines of their own log inline, without leaving the page.
• Auto-restart on crash — on by default for the sidecars PortBay can restart. Turn it off per sidecar.
• What is this? — what the sidecar does and why PortBay bundles it.

An app-owned sidecar whose live state isn't directly observable from a read-only surface (the CLI/MCP core, or mkcert which has no persistent process) reads as informational ("presumed OK") rather than a false warning — this is the same honesty principle Doctor applies to the same sidecars.

Also Shown Here

• Databases — external Postgres/MySQL instances and PortBay-managed engines, read-only status alongside the sidecars.
• Local AI (Ollama) — whether PortBay is supervising a local Ollama server it started, versus one you're running yourself.

When a Sidecar Won't Come Back Up

1. Refresh sidecar status.
2. Restart the failed sidecar from its card.
3. Retry the project action that failed.
4. If it immediately crashes again, open its log tail from the card and check the last 20 lines.
5. In development builds, verify the sidecar binary actually exists under src-tauri/binaries/.

See Troubleshooting → Sidecar Failures for the full error-code mapping (SIDECAR_DOWN, CADDY_FAILURE, DNSMASQ_FAILURE, MAILPIT_FAILURE).