Portside

A native-feeling macOS app for managing Docker on your QNAP NAS
(or any TLS-enabled Docker host). Built for home labs, by a home labber.

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⚠️ Full disclosure: I am not a programmer

This entire app was vibe coded with Claude (Anthropic's AI). I'm an IT guy with a QNAP NAS, a pile of *arr containers, and opinions about UI — not a developer. I described what I wanted, Claude wrote literally every line, tested it against my actual NAS, and we went back and forth until it felt like a real Mac app.

I wanted Portainer-style container management without opening a browser tab, plus the stuff Container Station refuses to do nicely. Now it exists, and since it's genuinely become my daily driver, I figured I'd share it.

What that means for you: it works great on my setup (QNAP QTS 5.x, Container Station, ~22 containers, Apple Silicon Mac). Beyond that — read the code, trust nothing, file issues, and keep your expectations calibrated to "a guy and his AI made this in a day." 😄

What it does

• 📊 Dashboard — host CPU/memory rings, network throughput, live history charts (Live / 24h / 7d, persisted to disk), top-consumer leaderboards
• 💡 Insights — crash detection with exit codes, restart loops, health checks, high CPU/memory alerts, network & disk hogs, dangling-image prune button
• ⬆️ Image update checker — compares your containers' image digests against the registry (built-in Watchtower, but you stay in control) with one-click pull & recreate + rollback

• _ Terminal — exec into any running container, full xterm with colors

• 📁 File Browser — browse mapped volumes (or the full container fs), download, upload, and edit config files in-app
• 🚀 Deploy wizard — pull an image and create a container with ports/volumes/env/restart policy, no YAML required
• 📜 Live logs — streaming with ANSI colors, pause, and search
• ☷ Activity feed — real-time Docker events (starts, stops, crashes, pulls)
• 🖥 Multi-host — manage several Docker hosts, each with its own TLS certs
• 📍 Menu bar companion — graphical popover with rings, sparkline and per-container actions; the app keeps monitoring (and notifying) with the window closed
• 🌐 Web UI buttons — one click opens any container's web interface
• 🎨 Dark / light / system themes, four logo colorways, autostart, startup animation

Screenshots

Dashboard	File Browser

Install

1. Grab the latest .dmg from Releases
2. Drag Portside to Applications
3. First launch: right-click → Open (it's unsigned — I'm not paying Apple $99/year for a hobby project, sorry)
4. Settings → add your host's IP and import your TLS certificates

Apple Silicon only for now. Intel Mac users can build from source with npm run build.

Getting your QNAP certificates

Container Station → Preferences → Docker Certificate → Download. Unzip it — you get ca.pem, cert.pem and key.pem. Import all three via Settings → TLS Certificates (per-host import supported). Also make sure Container Station's Docker API (port 2376) is enabled.

Any other Docker host with TLS (dockerd with --tlsverify) works the same way.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Mac2100/portside.git
cd portside
npm install
npm start          # run it
npm run build      # build the .app / .dmg into dist/

How it works (as explained to me)

Plain Electron — no frameworks, one HTML file, a main process that talks to the Docker Engine API directly over TLS. Terminal sessions use the exec API with a hijacked TCP stream, the file browser rides the archive API with a hand-rolled tar parser, and the update checker does registry digest comparisons with proper bearer-token auth. The menu bar panel is a frameless vibrancy window. Your certs and config never leave your machine.

Disclaimers

• Not affiliated with Docker, QNAP, Portainer, or the *arr projects
• The container update feature recreates containers (config and volumes are preserved, old container logs are not)
• An AI wrote this. A human (me) merely yelled directions and clicked "yes". Review the code before trusting it with anything important — it's ~3,000 lines and honestly pretty readable

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal use, home labs, hobby projects, education, and nonprofits. If you want to use Portside commercially (sell it, bundle it, build a paid product on it), that requires my permission — open an issue or get in touch.

Translation: enjoy it at home, but if you make a million bucks off it, I'd like to hear about it first. 😄