What is portero?

Portero is a native Mac app that shows you everything running on your open network ports, in plain language. If you work on several projects at once, it is easy to lose track of what is using which port, a database here, a leftover dev server there, and Portero is built to clear that up. The app lists every listening TCP and UDP port on your machine and refreshes automatically, showing the process name, PID, address, protocol, user, and start time for each one. Instead of a cryptic binary name, it recognizes hundreds of common processes and tools and tells you plainly what each one is, for example a Vite dev server or a PostgreSQL database. Processes are grouped into System, Apps, Terminal, and Other so you can see at a glance what is safe to touch. You can kill a process gracefully or force it to quit, and select several rows to kill at once. When more than one process is fighting over the same port, Portero flags the conflict and lets you filter straight to it. You can also block inbound or outbound traffic on any port using the Mac's built in firewall, with the rules kept in their own dedicated space so no system files are ever edited. If a port is serving a web page, a globe button lets you open it straight in your browser. You can star processes you never want to accidentally kill, and search, filter, and sort the list by port, process, path, command line, or PID. The interface is available in English and Portuguese. Under the hood, Portero is built with Tauri 2, pairing a Rust backend with a React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS frontend. The backend calls standard Mac system tools such as lsof and ps to discover ports and pfctl to manage firewall rules, and only asks for administrator access when you choose to apply a firewall change. It ships as a downloadable disk image for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and can also be built from source with Rust, Node.js, and pnpm. The project does not yet specify a license.