DevMesh

Peer-to-peer dev mesh for sharing local services across machines.

Overview

DevMesh lets you run services locally on your machine, discover peers on the same network (LAN or VPN), and route HTTP traffic by service name. Use http://mono:8080/ instead of http://localhost:3000—DevMesh routes to your local service or to a peer if you're not running it.

• Register services from devmesh.toml
• HTTP reverse proxy routes by Host header
• UDP broadcast for peer discovery (same subnet)
• Branch-based namespaces (git branch → isolated mesh)
• Version awareness with optional strict mode
• Web dashboard and graph visualization

Install

1. Install Rust first: rustup.rs

cargo install devmesh

Or from repo: cargo install --path .

Quick Start

Or run devmesh setup for an interactive wizard.

1. Create devmesh.toml

[services.mono]
port = 3000
version = "1.0.0"

2. One-time host setup

devmesh install

Add the printed line to /etc/hosts (macOS/Linux) or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows).

3. Start the proxy

devmesh proxy

Leave this running. Press Ctrl+C to stop gracefully.

4. Register and run your service

devmesh run mono
# Then start your app on port 3000

5. Access

curl http://mono:8080/

6. Add another machine

On another machine on the same network, run devmesh proxy and devmesh run mono. They discover each other. Requests route locally first, then to peers. Round-robin when multiple peers have the same service.

Commands

setup	Interactive setup wizard
from-docker	Discover services from Docker (--write to merge into config)
run <service>	Register service (from config)
stop <service>	Unregister service
status	List local and peer services (--routes for routing)
install	Show /etc/hosts line
proxy	Start HTTP proxy + discovery
graph	ASCII mesh (--json, -o file)
dashboard	Web UI (port 3005)
docs	Serve this documentation (port 3006)
db status	Registry and peers paths/stats

Global: --config PATH uses a specific config file.

Configuration

Config is loaded from devmesh.toml (cwd), ~/.devmesh/config.toml, or DEVMESH_CONFIG / --config.

[proxy]
port = 8080
version_strict = false    # true = reject on version mismatch
cache_ttl_secs = 1

[discovery]
port = 35555
# broadcast_addr = "10.42.0.255"   # for VPN

[namespace]
override = "my-ns"        # overrides git branch
auto = true               # use git branch (default)

[services.mono]
port = 3000
version = "1.0.0"

[services.ui]
port = 3001

# Multi-port: api at api:8080, api-8001:8080
[services.api]
port = 8000
ports = [8001]

Docker

devmesh from-docker discovers running Docker containers with published ports. Preview with:

devmesh from-docker

Merge into devmesh.toml with:

devmesh from-docker --write

Containers with only unpublished ports (e.g. 8080/tcp) are skipped. Multi-port containers (e.g. RabbitMQ 5672, 15672) are supported.

Namespaces

Services and peers are isolated by namespace. Default: namespace = current git branch (sanitized, e.g. feature/foo → feature-foo).

• [namespace] override = "staging" — fixed namespace
• [namespace] auto = false — use "default" instead of git
• X-DevMesh-Namespace: staging — per-request override (proxy)

Dashboard and API support ?namespace= to view other namespaces.

Dashboard

devmesh dashboard

Opens http://127.0.0.1:3005. Shows local services, peers, version mismatches. Use the namespace input to switch namespaces.

Version Awareness

Set version in [services.X]. Clients can send X-DevMesh-Expected-Version: ^1.0 (semver range). If target version doesn't match:

• version_strict = false (default): warn only
• version_strict = true: return 409 Conflict

Major version mismatches are highlighted in status and dashboard.