See what is running on your machine.
LocalDocks is a local development dashboard for Windows. It shows the services, processes and listening ports you own — and tells development work apart from the thirty other things on your machine that happen to hold a socket.
Windows 10 1809+ · x64 · no administrator rights · no network client
Why it exists
Something is on the port. Finding out what is the slow part.
Running a frontend, an API, a worker and a database at once is normal. Working out which of them is holding a port usually is not: it means netstat, a PID, Task Manager, and a column that only tells you the executable name.
Task Manager answers a different question
It is built for a machine that is misbehaving, not for a development environment. It has no notion of a port, and no notion of which processes are the ones you started.
netstat answers half of it
A PID is not an identity — Windows recycles them — and the output stops exactly where the useful part starts: what the process actually is, and whether it is yours.
Most of the list is not your work
On a normal desktop most processes listening on a non-system port are browsers, music players, sync clients and vendor helpers. Your dev servers are in there somewhere.
The central idea
Two modes, one switch.
Developer mode shows the services the Developer Registry classified as development work, the processes that own them, and the sockets those processes hold — and nothing else. System mode shows everything LocalDocks can observe. Switching costs nothing: mode is presentation, never collection.
Classification
Never by port number. Always with a reason.
A port is a number a program chose; it is not evidence of what that program is. LocalDocks classifies against the executable and its command line, using a versioned registry, and publishes the sentence that produced each verdict.
- developer
- Recognised development work — a runtime matched by a command-line signature, or a dedicated development program matched by name.
- system
- Recognised as something else — a browser, a sync client, a vendor helper.
- unclassified
- A real answer, not a gap in the UI. The registry is not exhaustive, so anything it has never seen is reported as unrecognised rather than guessed in either direction.
What V1 does
Six things, each done properly.
V1 is deliberately about visibility rather than control. Everything below is implemented and running in the application today.
Services
A service is derived, not guessed: a process you own holding a listening socket on a non-system port. No name allowlist, no port table.
Processes
Every process your account owns, with CPU, working-set memory, thread count and uptime. The ones holding a socket are marked.
Ports
TCP IPv4, TCP IPv6 and UDP listeners, one row per socket and deliberately unmerged — because a dual-stack bind is two facts, not one.
System telemetry
CPU and per-core CPU, memory, network, storage, GPU and ACPI thermal zones. A reading the machine cannot provide says so, and says why.
Developer Registry
Classification by executable and command line, never by port number and never by what spawned it. Every verdict carries its reason.
Safe actions
A process is identified by PID and creation time together. Every destructive action re-verifies that identity before it touches anything.
System telemetry
A measurement it cannot take says so.
Machine-wide CPU and per-logical-processor CPU, memory, network throughput, disk throughput and active time, GPU utilisation and memory, and ACPI thermal zones. Nothing renders as 0% or 0 MB/s unless that is the measurement.
Posture
Unelevated, local, and cautious about killing things.
It never elevates
LocalDocks does not request administrator rights and never asks for SeDebugPrivilege. It therefore sees only processes your own account owns — a deliberate limit, stated in the interface rather than hidden.
It sends nothing anywhere
No network client, no analytics, no crash reporter, no account. The only thing it writes outside its own settings is a capped local log of warnings and errors.
A recycled PID cannot be killed
Terminating re-opens the process and checks its creation time still matches the row you clicked. If Windows has reused the PID, the action is refused rather than performed on the wrong process.
Appearance
Three themes, chosen explicitly.
Local Dark, Dark and Light. The choice is yours and it is remembered — there is deliberately no 'follow the system' option, because a window that repaints itself mid-scan is a surprise in a monitoring tool.
Point it at your machine.
V1 is functionally complete and released. The download page explains exactly what exists today and what does not.