I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

by graiz • 3 months ago

144 150 3 months ago

yunruse• 3 months ago

This project is essentially "give me some metadata & a command which takes env $PORT, and I'll handle the rest". Which is neat!

I am also sick of handling port numbers - I end up allocating them on a schema to different services, so for testing I can spool any VM/service combination and avoid crossover. But if I want the same service twice, ah...

It always fascinated me that ports don't have any kind of textual resolver, so you can bind to `:1234` and also say "please also accept `:foobar`". But that would itself require some kind of "port resolver" on a device, and that's another service to break and fix :)

winstonwinston• 3 months ago

There is /etc/services to map port numbers to service names, and using getportbyname() to resolve port numbers.

axus• 3 months ago

DNS for /etc/hosts and now vibe.local for /etc/services. What will they think of next!

kasperni• 3 months ago

Not the same, but omeone recently posted this "port" tool here on HN: https://github.com/raskrebs/sonar

thunderbong• 3 months ago

HN Thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47452515

zdw• 3 months ago

It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...

tolciho3• 3 months ago

And then they might code up some sort of service lookup tool thingy to use on the train wreck that is the modern web.

  $ getent services gopher
  gopher               70/tcp

otabdeveloper4• 3 months ago

Heck, maybe even `resolvectl service`?

pratyahava10• 3 months ago

this is a nice idea, but idk why, in macos if i do `nc -l 127.0.0.1 gopher` and then try to open url "http://127.0.0.1:gopher/" - safari does not open it, no requests visible in the `nc` output.

also `curl -v http://127.0.0.1:gopher/` gives error message

  * URL rejected: Port number was not a decimal number between 0 and 65535
  * Closing connection
  curl: (3) URL rejected: Port number was not a decimal number between 0 and 65535

so the ports are named, it is nice, but in practice it does not make life easier.

lloeki• 3 months ago

And if they want name resolution, maybe even names that reflect the scope of its location like .localhost or .internal

TomK32• 3 months ago

Sure, but they are running web-apps they've vibe-coded (hence the .vibe tld) and for that use-case of many web apps that I run in docker containers I use nginx-proxy [0]. All the container needs is a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable with the domain and what my router needs is an address entry for the wildcard subdomains. I even have nginx-proxy on a internet-accessible staging server.

[0] https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy

locknitpicker2• 3 months ago

It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...

People shit-talk container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, but if anything they greatly simplified (if not completely eliminated) the need for this sort of network bookkeeping.

nesarkvechnep• 3 months ago

You forgot the /s at the end.

npodbielski2• 3 months ago

This is exact problem I see with all of those vibe coded software: In few years everything will be super fragmented, everyone will be using their own set of tools, or vibe coding them, themselves. Communication between teams or even between team members will become very hard because of those differences. 'What do you mean production is down? On my vibe coded dashboard everything is green!'

spiderfarmer• 3 months ago

Why do people always assume that change is permanent?

It's never.

After decentralisation we always see decentralisation. After a period of growth, a decline will follow. After the vibe coding hype, consolidation will follow. After rain comes sunshine.

teddyh• 3 months ago

It’s the Lisp curse again.

“[X] is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in [X].”

— <https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html#ma...>

meitham• 3 months ago

Perhaps we could even make the file the port itself, perhaps calling it a “socket”? A “unix socket” would be a great name. If we could place all these files behind a local reverse proxy then we could use localhost/jekyll or localhost/fastapi. It’s just a dream

fulafel• 3 months ago

If the port number space was bigger, I wonder if we would have gotten a global naming service (ala DNS) for unique service names.

You can still publish port numbers along with addresses in DNS though (SRV records).

rdevilla• 3 months ago

Not modern enough. Unix is too low level, antiquated, and discriminates against those who just want to get shit done instead of reading manpages or documentation by hand.

sgarland2• 3 months ago

This is the best example of Poe’s Law I’ve ever seen. Well done…?

loa_in_• 3 months ago

What about identifying different instances of the same service?

maeglin• 3 months ago

Top reply, and clearly based on the article's title rather than its content, as are the follow-ups. You're making this site worse.

The article is short; go read it then come back and delete.

stronglikedan• 3 months ago

Sounds like more of a problem with the title than the person you're attempting to insult.

halJordan2• 3 months ago

The article is about the dude not knowing what service is where so he codes a json mapping. He could just update his /etc/services for the same thing. Oh but wait, he mentioned ai agents that changes everything!

amelius• 3 months ago

You have to be root to edit /etc/services ...

necovek• 3 months ago

I am pretty convinced you need root on most systems to update DNS resolution mechanism system-wide (eg. to edit /etc/hosts or run a local DNS server and put that into /etc/resolv.conf).

qurren2• 3 months ago

URLs already have default ports for service names as a feature.

http:// means port 80 unless specified otherwise

https:// means port 443 unless specified otherwise

ftp:// means port 21 unless specified otherwise

sftp:// means port 22 unless specified otherwise

...

The practical solution for TFA is actually just an nginx server running on port 80 with proxy_pass

    location /blog/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000 ;
    }

    location /tensorboard/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6006;
    }

...

jameshart• 3 months ago

How many little web servers work without issue when their root page is loaded from a path other than /?

halJordan2• 3 months ago

That's because there defines in etc services (really the place where etc services gets its mapping). You're putting the cart in front of the horse

jasonlotito2• 3 months ago

No, go ahead. Tell me how just using /etc/services does what this does. Because I'm calling bullshit.

But go ahead. /etc/services, please, share with me how it's setup to do thing likes create the HTPS and makes it trusted and sets up the domain. Go ahead.

Go ahead. You can ONLY use /etc/services.

Or, you are admit you don't actually have a clue as to what /etc/services does.

kjs3• 3 months ago

That would mean not being able to vibe code up an entire app to deal with something as insurmountable as looking at a list of numbers and post it on HN for those sweet, sweet upvotes. Why would they not do that.

xnx• 3 months ago

The best way to find the right answer on the Internet is to slop-code a half-assed solution to a long-solved problem.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Sidenote: A good AI would interject, Clippy-like, "It looks like you're trying to recreate /etc/services. Would you like me to explain what that is?"

pyreal• 3 months ago

I created something similar to help me spin up complex apps in multiple worktrees with full port orchestration: https://outport.dev/

hahahacorn• 3 months ago

Bind to Port 0

CGamesPlay• 3 months ago

I've built this twice before. The main problem that I hit is that the AI agents suck at the process lifecycle management: leaving processes alive, starting the same daemon multiple times, etc.

From a brief glance over the code I like the approaches I see. Using the `/etc/resolver/` mechanism is a new trick to me!

The interesting part to me isn't the port numbers, it's the automatic service start/stop, including idle route shutdown.

elchief• 3 months ago

I'm slightly annoyed that vite's default port isn't 8483

chrisweekly• 3 months ago

why?

kseistrup• 3 months ago

VITE typed on a T9 keyboard is 8483.

nektro• 3 months ago

i have something like this too, currently a 60 line nodejs file

arjie• 3 months ago

This is a valid concern, certainly. I use kube for most things so it's not a problem, but my homeserver and its apps run on quadlets that I manage. In my case, I just added a README.md in the server account folder that each project's CLAUDE.md or whatever is configured to read. Then it selects a port and sticks that in the document and to be honest I have a few tens of services and it works. Haha, a direct replacement of machine for my own process.

system22• 3 months ago

It is funny, I just built something like this last week and named it "Network". Additionally it scans for any type of data packages arriving at the SonicWall and sees if they are approved by me or not. I am paranoid after using TP Link at home like a dumbass.

iib• 3 months ago

I am very out of the loop. What is wrong with TP Link? What are the risks with it?

system22• 3 months ago

Chinese spyware.

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1pxe1zc/tplink_ban_pro...

https://www.pcmag.com/news/facing-router-ban-tp-link-tells-f...

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/foreign-made-wi-f...

Just search for "TP Link ban", you will see a lot of news. I switched to SonicWall + Ubiquiti + my own monitoring software to be safe. I should've done it years ago, but I was lazy.

isodude2• 3 months ago

Why not resolve everything with UNIX sockets instead, that way you can have them named and scoped instead, hiding behind port 443, since it's mosly HTTP anyway.

tdeck2• 3 months ago

Does this work in the browser? How will paths to different resources used by the web app work?

dvhh• 3 months ago

works with curl, maybe there is a case to either build a proxy for UDS and expose them to a browser, or open a request ticket to browser maintainers to support UDS

isodude2• 3 months ago

It depends on how you register things.

* Given that you can easily start up your own CA in a test bed, just use different domain names.

* Or use IP addresses directly, given that IPv6 i pretty abundant it's easy to just listen on many addresses at the same time. A nice thing is to just put the port number is the last octets: fd01::9000, fd01::0003:5565. If it's HTTPS you always use port 443, if it's another protocol, use another port. With iptables/nft you can translate all port 443 traffic towards a /96 to a single IP.

* Firefox does not seem to understand unix domain sockets, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941552. I'm assuming that you have a gateway in front that handles that aspect.

* Proxies in Firefox seems to understand that though, which means you can have a proxy that translate to unix sockets locally. That means you can basically run it to a namespaced application, using only http://<service>.localhost.

magicalhippo4• 3 months ago

I know it's mixing of layers, but I can't help but feel the IPv6 transition missed the boat when they didn't just get rid of ports in the process. They've changed so much else anyway.

Want to run another webserver instance or whatever on your computer? Get the OS to allocate a new IP for it. Ports be damned.

Could be implemented in a backwards compatible way by requiring all IPv6 TCP/UDP traffic to use a fixed port number.

pratyahava10• 3 months ago

ipv6 packet does not have any port field. ports are on the level of tcp and udp, and you don't have to use tcp or udp on top of ipv6. ipv4 packet does not have any port information as well.

magicalhippo4• 3 months ago

ipv6 packet does not have any port field

Yes, that's why I said I know it was mixing of layers.

However ports are a layer violation in a strict sense, introduced as a workaround because there was no easy way to just add thousands of new IPs to a single host back in the IPv4 days. No need to continue a workaround that causes grief on a daily basis.

chuckadams3• 3 months ago

tcp6 is a thing though, was created at the same time as ipv6, and it does have ports, along with udp6. But if you really want one ip per stream and just hardwire port 1 or something, it's not like IPv6 does anything to stand in the way of that. Mght have performance issues on some OS's binding thousands of IPs to one interface, but that's on them to fix. Bigger lift would be the APIs that would need to change to manage whole prefixes at a time instead of single IPs.

absynth• 3 months ago

Conceptually its doable on linux and ipv6. Have the listening program sit on that default port of 80.

Something involving socat, an any-IP / TCP routing rule, a VPS or other machine with a ipv6 /64 and plenty of duct-tape.

You'd get an application sitting on port 80 accessible via some unique ipv6 address (in the /64) on a tcp port 80. They needn't be the same port number but it would make it easier.

tdeck2• 3 months ago

What is the benefit of using HTTPS for this particular use case?

t0mas88• 3 months ago

Some browser functions only work over https, localhost is the exception. So if you change localhost:5173 to myapp.vibe it needs a valid certificate.

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

And localhost being the exception is often quite painful - I've stuck into several projects that worked just fine on localhost, and then were a pain in the neck to convert to run in secure contexts

hotfixguru• 3 months ago

Vercel’s portless is a great alternative, but unfortunately it doesn’t work well with oauth flows. I’ve built portmap[0] to solve that. Also comes with skills which makes it work really great with coding agents (instructions in the readme).

[0] https://github.com/JonasKs/portmap

lainzhow• 3 months ago

I wonder why not use nginx and some local DNS settings to just serve all these local services under a new, local URL.

Not too long ago I had a similar issue and solved with that.

indigodaddy• 3 months ago

I mean, that's essentially what he's recreating here it looks like

gbalduzzi• 3 months ago

I did the same using caddy for ease of getting https certificates

riffraff• 3 months ago

I think about a decade ago pow did something similar, but using the .test domain, and perhaps ruby specific

https://github.com/basecamp/pow/tree/master

sakesun• 3 months ago

Aspire.dev should be mentioned here.

pratikdeoghare• 3 months ago

What I do is use a hash function to derive port number from service name.

hboon• 3 months ago

I use Cloudflare Tunnel so most of the products I build are exposed and listed there. I just add comments for those that aren't exposed (eg. browser extension dev port) to that file too. A single doc means coding agents know to look there and keep it updated too.

roywashere• 3 months ago

I hate these signs of LLM generated texts so much!!

The real annoyance is that it wasn’t just one machine. It was layers.

PufPufPuf2• 3 months ago

There is no need to come up with "local TLDs" like .vibe, .local, .test and so on -- there is already an industry convention! macOS and most Linux distros support subdomains of localhost, so <anything>.localhost works. You still need the reverse proxy to do the host->port mapping, but you save yourself local DNS fiddling.

locknitpicker2• 3 months ago

There is no need to come up with "local TLDs" like .vibe, .local, .test and so on -- there is already an industry convention! macOS and most Linux distros support subdomains of localhost, so <anything>.localhost works.

That would work if your goal was to route traffic to localhost.

What if it isn't?

There are reasons why the likes of example.com exists.

ButlerianJihad3• 3 months ago

It looks like this will win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

example.com, and the reserved TLD ".example", exist for technical documentation and writing. If you are writing a comment on HN, or a curriculum for a networking class, then you can discuss "foo.example.com connects to bar.example.com" or "Let's hypothesize about two offices called accounts.example and human-resources.example"

The "example" domains are never supposed to reflect anything that is actually deployed onto LANs, or test labs, or the Internet, current situation notwithstanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example

There are, likewise, IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that are reserved to be used in documentation. Not the 192.168.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, but separate ranges that writers only write about, and are never deployed, not even in private.

localhost is only ever going to be the loopback interface, never across a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.localhost#Conventional_use

The latter article lists foreign-language TLDs which serve the same purpose.

Some proposals are described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.home

JimDabell• 3 months ago

From the article:

So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
The whole thing communicates over a Unix socket acting as a reverse proxy. No external services, no accounts, no telemetry.

We’re discussing a tool that is designed for – and is only capable of – routing traffic to localhost. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that there’s an easier solution for this use case.

vlucas• 3 months ago

Portless is a great tool for this! I use it for all my apps now. Zero config + built in HTTPS locally.

https://portless.sh/

Example from the website:

- "dev": "next dev" # http://localhost:3000

+ "dev": "portless myapp next dev" # https://myapp.localhost

tylorr• 3 months ago

I use the tailscale services feature for this, added benefit is I get https.

Hard_Space• 3 months ago

I use subdomains on an OVH VPS, since I want to access the services outside the network, so I can use freshrss.mydomain.com. But anything that can rationalize port number sprawl is welcome.

lihanghanger• 3 months ago

This is a neat approach. One thing I wonder about is how it handles services that use the same port number across different protocols (like 443 for both HTTPS and SMTPS). The /etc/services file approach has the same ambiguity, but at least it lists the protocol alongside the port. A lookup table that includes protocol would be more robust for mixed environments.

lelanthran2• 3 months ago

I think this product demonstrates the atrophying of thought that results from too much LLM usage: design was obviously a long back-and-forth with a sycophantic LLM.

I find out what all my local servers are by `cat /etc/hosts`, because I put them in there. They run using an entry in the nginx config.

For short-lived stuff I don't even bother with that, I just use `whatever.localhost`.

If there was no LLM, author would have put a little more thought into this, maybe did a google search, and realised that all he needed were two shell scripts.

The more you use LLMs, the less you actually think

The real annoyance is that it wasn’t just one machine. It was layers.
I wanted a simple launcher for all the things that aren’t traditional desktop apps. Not Finder, Alfred or Raycast.

The entire damn article is like this - why would I trust software to run on my local machine when it was written by someone who did not even take care writing a blog post? How much care would they have possibly put into reviewing their vibe coded slop if they couldn't even bother to review their blog post?

firefoxd2• 3 months ago

That was my exact post a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936315 (didn't get much traction)

skeledrew3• 3 months ago

I put them in there

That seems to run orthogonal to this. The primary benefit I see here is not having to care at all what ports apps are actually starting on. Just run them, and access them by name. Same as a regular website on the internet where one doesn't care about the IP.

How much care would they have possibly put into reviewing

Just enough to ensure that it works for them, which is what really matters. Others go in knowing that as well, and add/change that base to their own preference. That's the world we're now in.

lelanthran2• 3 months ago

Just enough to ensure that it works for them, which is what really matters.

If that's what really mattered they wouldn't have posted an article they didn't write trying to get traction on a product they didn't create from a userbase that doesn't need it.

dinkumthinkum• 3 months ago

I couldn't agree more. It seems so odd to have a HN submission for some vibe coded little "help-me tool" that is not clearly even needed. I wouldn't even say anything except the whole "vibe" thing is all over the article. It's just all a bit much. It's just sad.

firefoxd2• 3 months ago

There's a simple method you can use with nginx and /etc/hosts, I wrote about it couple days ago [0]. I used it for an internal demo recently and realized that a new breed of devs have never seen a non localhost url run locally.

[0] https://idiallo.com/blog/say-no-to-localhost3000-use-custom-...

Quarrel• 3 months ago

I essentially do this.

Super simple. (although I use rewrites at my dns layer for the whole local lan, but whatever)

It also solves issues my password manager has with multiple services on the one host but with different ports, but putting each on their own 2nd level domain.

chuckadams3• 3 months ago

Custom domain is nice if you're planning on a real host later, but nowadays you can just use the .localhost domain and skip the whole /etc/hosts editing thing.

danfritz• 3 months ago

Alternative https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

Granted no fancy UI to start and stop things but is it really needed?

Tbh this is not a single binary you need dnsmasq go and other things

junon• 3 months ago

This is literally what mDNS is for. Didn't even know that it was a thing until I needed it for some custom firmware I was writing recently. It's like DNS but also has service port advertisements.

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

I like localias[1] for this problem. Not only do you get nice aliases for all your local ports, but you also get nice Caddy-managed TLS certs for them

[1] https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

tasuki• 3 months ago

Huh when I start a service in dev, I just click on the link in the terminal to visit the url. What is even the problem?

joshka• 3 months ago

*.localhost works btw

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761#section-6.3

bennett_dev• 3 months ago

Sounds similar to Vercel‘s portless CLI (https://portless.sh/)

kazinator• 3 months ago

The file /etc/services maps names to port numbers, like /etc/hosts does for hosts.

E.g. "telnet localhost ssh" takes you to port 22 (not the default 23 for telnet). This works because /etc/services maps "ssh" to "22".

If you're sick of remembering port numbers, create some entries in your /etc/services.

Of course, only programs which use getservbyname to resolve port numbers will accept your names.

saidnooneever• 3 months ago

maintaining services files.

i dont know why people keep insiting on that file while there are perfectly fine commands to pull from your boxes what is holding what port.

that is all besides the point though if you look at what you should be doing and keeping all this information in some kind of asset management system from which you can deploy things (which is kinda what k8s and docker etc. try to do (miserably)).

unless you are binding stuff to random ports on random boxes there is no need to do any of it at runtime and you can just consult your bookkeeping (for which etc services lacks a lot of details to use...)

stuaxo• 3 months ago

Interesting.

I've been wanting something like this for local Dev, but I think more:

Per user DNS.

So if the process doing the lookup is my own then redirect to the named service.

skeledrew3• 3 months ago

Nice. An instant disappointment that there's no Linux support, but adding it should be a quick prompt away.

kamma4434• 3 months ago

I thought that was the reason ‘lsof -i -P’ existed

BrandiATMuhkuh• 3 months ago

Cool project. Just yesterday I looked at https://portless.sh/ which is vercels take.

OriPekelman• 3 months ago

This is really amusing. Because absolutly eveyrone I know vibe-coded this thing. I think the first one was https://github.com/ralt/dns-to-port possibly mine is second (but it is very much a joke so I am not linking it) .. Vercel later did https://github.com/vercel-labs/portless and I would imagine quite a few others. Zeitgeist. Also this does probably mean its kinda useful.

And that none of us can get bothered to "Google" if a thing that does the same thing already exists. Currently vibing, on a train, a spaced repetition thing for my kid - because I needed a specific list of countries - and its faster to create the whole app rather than figure-out how to find one that would do this.

allarm6• 3 months ago

a spaced repetition thing

anki?...

michaelcampbell• 3 months ago

I do exactly this for the half dozen or so ports that I do care to remember.

hollow-moe• 3 months ago

You might also use another "localhost", the whole 127.0.0.0/8 is reserved for them. macos is a pain there because it only binds 127.0.0.1 to the local interface but you can add more manually.

deafpolygon• 3 months ago

Unrelated, but that site is unreadable to me... dark grey on black?

allarm6• 3 months ago

People will do anything to avoid learning the basics. Nothing new.

rasso• 3 months ago

Do you have a link for me? I'd like to learn them, but find it really hard to find them.

For example, I had never heard about etc/services until 2 minutes ago

allarm6• 3 months ago

Check out this book:

Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth et al.

I'm pretty sure Arch wiki is worth reading, too.

c-hendricks• 3 months ago

A few other solutions / notes:

Your browser might be able find what you're looking for if you just type in the page title

Your dev stuff could just open the browser automatically when you start it

*.localhost is a Secure Context in Chrome and Firefox

NoSalt• 3 months ago

Wow ... judging from all of these harsh comments, it seems the flood from Reddit to HN is going "well". I cannot believe all of the negative comments around the development of a piece of handy software.

llagerlof• 3 months ago

I mean, it’s the shitty human nature. You can't create anything publicly without people bashing your project, and you, for the sheer insolence of creating a piece of software.

FactoriumNet• 3 months ago

I have a strange short-term memory that immediately forgets where I was. I think it just decides I made my decision and no longer needed that trivia clouding the next thought. This is exactly what I have struggled with. Thanks a ton for this!!

alsetmusic• 3 months ago

Don't use localhost:3000, use your own custom domain[0]

0. https://idiallo.com/blog/say-no-to-localhost3000-use-custom-...

dhruv3006• 3 months ago

yep - we do need solutions here - nice one.

I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

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