middleman

A local-first GitHub dashboard for project maintainers. Syncs PRs and issues from your repos into SQLite, serves a fast Svelte 5 frontend from a single binary, and keeps you out of GitHub's notification inbox.

Middleman runs entirely on your machine — no hosted service, no telemetry, no account to create. One binary, one config file, and you're up.

Features

Activity feed

A unified timeline of comments, reviews, and commits across all your repos. Switch between flat and threaded views. Threaded view groups events by PR/issue and collapses long commit runs for readability.

Filter by time range (24h / 7d / 30d / 90d), event type, repo, item type (PRs vs issues), or free-text search. Hide closed items and bot noise with a toggle.

Pull request management

Browse, search, and filter PRs across repos. From the detail view you can:

• Comment directly on a PR
• Approve a PR
• Merge with your choice of merge commit, squash, or rebase
• Mark draft PRs as ready for review
• Close and reopen PRs
• Star items for quick filtering

Review decisions, diff stats (additions/deletions), CI status, and branch info are visible at a glance.

Kanban board

Track PRs through New / Reviewing / Waiting / Awaiting Merge columns with drag-and-drop. Kanban state is local to middleman — it doesn't touch your GitHub labels or projects.

Issue tracking

Same filtering, search, and detail view as PRs. Post comments, close/reopen, and star issues without context-switching to GitHub.

CI checks

Expandable check run section on each PR shows pass/fail/pending status with color-coded indicators and direct links to the failing run on GitHub.

Sync engine

• Runs immediately on startup, then on a configurable interval (default 5 minutes)
• Opening a PR or issue triggers an immediate sync for that item
• The active detail view polls every 60 seconds for new comments
• Progress is visible in the status bar; errors surface clearly

Keyboard navigation

Key	Action
j / k	Move through the list
1 / 2	Switch between list and kanban views
Escape	Close detail view / clear selection

Other

• Dark mode — auto-detects system preference, with a manual toggle
• Copy to clipboard — one-click copy of PR/issue bodies and comments
• Settings UI — add/remove repos and configure activity feed defaults from the browser
• Reverse proxy support — deploy behind a proxy with the base_path config
• Version info — middleman version prints the version, commit, and build date

Quickstart

Requirements

• Go 1.26+
• Bun (or install via mise)
• A GitHub token (classic or fine-grained with repo read access)

Build and run

git clone https://github.com/wesm/middleman.git
cd middleman
make build

Set your token and start middleman:

export MIDDLEMAN_GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here
./middleman

If you use the GitHub CLI, middleman will use gh auth token automatically — no env var needed.

On first run, middleman creates a default config at ~/.config/middleman/config.toml and serves the UI at http://localhost:8090. Add repositories from the Settings page, or edit the config file directly:

[[repos]]
owner = "your-org"
name = "your-repo"

[[repos]]
owner = "your-org"
name = "another-repo"

Install to PATH

make install   # installs to ~/.local/bin

Configuration

All fields are optional. Repos can be added in the config file or through the Settings UI.

Field	Default	Description
sync_interval	"5m"	How often to pull from GitHub
github_token_env	"MIDDLEMAN_GITHUB_TOKEN"	Env var holding your token
host	"127.0.0.1"	Listen address
port	8090	Listen port
base_path	"/"	URL prefix for reverse proxy deployments
data_dir	"~/.config/middleman"	Directory for the SQLite database
activity.view_mode	"threaded"	"flat" or "threaded"
activity.time_range	"7d"	"24h", "7d", "30d", or "90d"
activity.hide_closed	false	Hide closed/merged items in the feed
activity.hide_bots	false	Hide bot activity

Architecture

Middleman is a single Go binary with the Svelte frontend embedded at build time. No external services — just SQLite on disk.

middleman binary
  ├── Config loader (TOML)
  ├── Sync engine → GitHub API (go-github)
  ├── SQLite database (WAL mode, pure Go driver)
  └── HTTP server (Huma) → REST API + embedded SPA

• No CGO required — uses modernc.org/sqlite, a pure Go SQLite implementation
• Loopback only — binds to 127.0.0.1 by default; this is a personal tool, not a shared service
• Graceful shutdown — handles SIGINT/SIGTERM cleanly

Development

Run the Go backend and Vite dev server in parallel:

make air-install    # one-time: install air for live reload
make dev            # Go server on :8090 with live reload
make frontend-dev   # Vite on :5173, proxies /api to Go

Other targets:

make build          # Debug build with embedded frontend
make build-release  # Optimized, stripped release binary
make test           # All Go tests
make test-short     # Fast tests only
make lint           # golangci-lint
make frontend-check # Svelte and TypeScript checks
make api-generate   # Regenerate OpenAPI spec and clients
make clean          # Remove build artifacts

Pre-commit hooks

Managed with prek:

brew install prek
prek install

License

MIT