vibepanel

A console for developers running several agents across several projects at
once. Stable, private, quick, and good to look at.

English · 简体中文

What it is

vibepanel is a working terminal for people who lean on agents hard. The front
end and the back end are separate: your terminals live in a dedicated system
service with a memory floor and a high priority, so an OOM or a crash somewhere
in the application layer does not cost you a session. The interface is a web
page, which means you can point it at a development box and reach it from
whatever device is in your hand.

On the security side, the source is 100% open and every release is packaged by
a public GitHub Action. What comes out is one Go binary with no dependencies
that never phones home, which is about as much as I can do for safety,
portability and speed at the same time. Upgrading or restarting the panel does
not touch a single session or a single running agent. It terminates its own
TLS, so you can put it on https and require a password or a passkey to get in.

On the UI side there are a lot of small deliberate things. The whole model is
projects and sessions, so you can see at a glance what every session in every
project is doing: finished, working, or waiting on you. Down the right there is
a file manager and a notebook, and you can move files and images in and out by
copy and paste, the way you would on your own machine.

Along the bottom I added a scratch terminal, because that is how I work: it is
there to look at a file or run something while the agent is still going, and it
saves you from interrupting the agent to ask. There is a separate interface
built for phones, and you can turn on system notifications or point them at a
channel of your own. Leaving the house stops being a reason to stop shipping.

The other thing I am fond of is read-only links. Put the whole system's status
on a monitor, or put tokens spent against code produced on a big screen so
whoever needs convincing can see it, or cycle through every agent on rotation.
There are a lot of templates and they work out of the box. Fine, I know this
is a niche feature. I still think it matters.

I will say this plainly: this is not AI slop. It is a terminal I use hard
every day and it is genuinely nice to use. I hope it saves you some time and
that you enjoy it. It is early, so come and join in if you have ideas or
complaints.

Screenshots of the real thing once I find projects I can show. I owe you.

Who it is for

Anyone who has several terminal agents open at once and needs to keep track of
them, or who has a development machine they want working around the clock and
reachable from any device.

The interactive installer (Linux/macOS)

It speaks 简体中文 and English and supports several ways of installing. The
comparison between them, and unattended installs, are further down.

Standard

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jiangmuran/vibepanel/main/install.sh | sh

Where the network is restricted

This is a public GitHub mirror run by jiangmuran. To keep it from being abused,
the first run prints a prompt in your terminal asking you to pass a check in a
browser.

curl -fsSL https://github.muran.tech/https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jiangmuran/vibepanel/main/install.sh -o vibepanel-install.sh \
  || curl -sSL https://github.muran.tech/https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jiangmuran/vibepanel/main/install.sh
sh vibepanel-install.sh --mirror

Managing it afterwards

vibepanel service status | start | stop | restart | logs | token | upgrade | uninstall

The rest is in docs/install.md: user unit against system
unit, every flag, unattended installs, creating the first account from the
command line, Docker, and building from source.

Features

docs/features.md
⚠️ Written by AI ⚠️

Flags and troubleshooting

Every flag has a VIBEPANEL_<UPPER_SNAKE> environment equivalent, and the flag
wins. A VIBEPANEL_* variable nothing reads is reported at startup and by
doctor rather than ignored, so a renamed setting is loud instead of quietly
doing nothing. The full table is in docs/install.md.

The same binary is also the admin CLI: serve, project, session, hook,
service, account, doctor and version.

Driving it from a program

TOKEN=…   # Settings → API tokens

curl -sX POST https://panel.example.com:18443/api/sessions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"projectId":"…","title":"billing","command":["claude"]}'

command is an argv; leave it out and you get a shell, which is what the
panel's own interface sends. Everything the front end can do is available over
the same API. docs/api.md is the whole surface, and it is checked
against the router in both directions: an endpoint missing from the page and a
paragraph describing one that no longer exists both fail the build.

Design notes

The principles the rest follows from:

• The page is a view, not the state. Close it, open it in three places,
  reload it mid-command; the sessions never notice.
• Done means the process exited, not that a session went quiet.
• Colour is never the only carrier of meaning.

Development

make check         # vet, gofmt, eslint, Go tests, frontend units — the fast gate
make verify        # everything, including the browser checks (~20 min)
make head-check    # build and test a clean worktree at HEAD, not the working tree

make check never starts a browser. Most of this project's bugs were found by
the ones that do:

The tmux wrapper is tested against a real tmux on a throwaway socket rather than
a mock; TEST_TMUX_BIN=/path/to/tmux go test ./... points it at another build.
web/scripts/shots.mjs takes screenshots by booting the real binary and
photographing it.

AGENTS.md has the conventions and the red lines.

License

MIT.