Installation

• macOS on Apple Silicon. The app is a Swift menu-bar agent and the privileged work uses ifconfig, dscacheutil and /etc/hosts — none of it is portable.
• An arm64 Mac. The Swift tray is compiled with an arm64-apple-macos13.0 target and there is no universal build, so an Intel Mac produces a binary it cannot run.
• Bun 1.2.5 or later on your PATH. The build embeds the very Bun binary it finds there into the bundle.
• The Xcode command line tools, for swiftc.
• git, to clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/rioukkevin/localhost-aliases.git
cd localhost-aliases
bun install
make bundle      # builds dist/LocalhostAliases.app
make install     # copies it into /Applications

make bundle compiles the Swift tray, builds the dashboard, compiles the forwarder and the MCP server with bun build --compile, copies your Bun binary and the privileged script into the bundle, and verifies the bundled dashboard boots. make install only copies the result into /Applications — it asks for no password and installs no system component.

Nothing has touched your machine at this point. The first change happens when you launch the app and accept the admin prompt, and the first run page describes exactly what that prompt does.

Open LocalhostAliases.app from /Applications — or from ~/Applications, which make install falls back to when /Applications is not writable, so that it never needs a password either. It is a menu-bar app with no dock icon and no window: the patchbay icon appears in the menu bar, and Open Dashboard opens the web UI in your browser.

Because the build is unsigned, Gatekeeper may refuse the first launch. Right-click the app and choose Open, then confirm. That is a decision about a binary you compiled a minute ago from source you can read.

The dashboard can be run on its own, with nothing installed and no privileges, for development only. In production it is never run outside the app bundle.

make dev      # dashboard only
make test     # unit tests (bun test)