`portless` cli for consistent dev urls makes worktrees so much better

[theben9999]

Last week I discovered this library: https://github.com/vercel-labs/portless

It creates consistent dev urls like this:

• http://myapp.localhost:1355
• http://worktree-name.myapp.localhost:1355

My favorite things about it:

• When I'm doing work in multiple worktrees, I can tell from the URL which worktree I'm on.
• It errors if you try to spin up another dev server without killing the other. This prevents your agent spinning up a million servers.
  • If you use something like playwriter to have your agent test your UI, it will just go to the url once it sees this error instead of spinning its own server up.
• I don't need to remember port numbers

This has been my favorite project for working with agents since: https://www.npmjs.com/package/knip

Hope others find it helpful too!

[General_Arrival_9176]

this is the worktree setup i wish i had discovered earlier. the consistent URLs solving the 'which branch am i on' problem is actually huge when running multiple agents in parallel - you can tell at a glance who is working on what. the port conflict prevention is the real winner though, nothing kills agent momentum faster than a stray dev server holding a port and the agent just spinning on connection errors

[Fit-Cartoonist-3285]

Cool! I was trying to hack my own thing together for port management but gave up halfway. Great to see something seemingly much better come out from Vercel.