Introduction

A developer machine runs a frontend, an API, a worker, a database and a dozen things nobody started on purpose. When a port is taken or a service will not start, finding out why means moving between a terminal, Task Manager and a browser — and none of those three knows about the other two.

LocalDocks puts the relationship in one place: the process, the sockets it holds, what the process actually is, and what the machine is doing while it runs.

The model

Four ideas carry the whole application, and every screen is one of them viewed from a different angle.

• A process is anything your Windows account owns. LocalDocks never elevates, so processes belonging to other accounts or to the system are outside what it can see.
• An endpoint is one listening socket — a protocol, an address and a port. A single program routinely holds several.
• A service is derived rather than declared: a process you own that holds at least one listening socket on a non-system port. There is no list of known program names to maintain.
• A classification is what the Developer Registry made of a service — developer, system or unclassified — decided from the executable and its command line.

Two modes

The switch in the title bar is the product’s central idea. Developer mode shows the services classified as development work, the processes that own them and the sockets those processes hold. System mode shows everything LocalDocks can observe.

Mode is presentation, never collection. The sampler produces the same complete snapshot either way, so switching costs nothing and can never cause the application to miss something.

What V1 does, and does not

V1 is about visibility. It reads, it classifies, it measures, and it can terminate a process you own. It does not start, stop or restart services — that is V2, and it is not built.

Requirements

• Windows 10 version 1809 or later, x64
• The WebView2 runtime — preinstalled on Windows 11 and current Windows 10
• No administrator rights. LocalDocks never elevates and never requests SeDebugPrivilege.

Everything in this documentation