Local Review

Local Review is a GitHub-style pull-request UI for the stack of commits on your machine, before any of it is pushed. Every commit is shown as its own PR, grouped into the stacks you mean to open. You review them like PRs, your coding agent reads your comments and replies in the same place, and when a stack is right, the agent publishes it as GitHub stacked PRs.

• Every commit is a PR, with a Conversation tab, a Files changed tab, a Stack tab and a readiness badge, grouped into colour-coded PR stacks, across one repo or several.
• Every effort in view. The root page shows each project as a card with a thumbnail of its stacks, and work that builds on other work is linked to it, in order.
• Your agent answers in the review. Comments are plain YAML files that any coding agent can read and reply to; the replies show up in your browser live, and threads follow their code through amends and rebases. A stack's or project's Comments tab gathers every thread on its PRs in one list, and what you type is kept as a draft until you send it.
• Publish when it's ready. local-review plan prints each PR's branch, base, title and body, and your agent opens the stack as GitHub native stacked PRs, posting the comments you marked for the GitHub PR. It works in front of any stacking tool.
• Safe to point at your work. It never modifies your repos, never talks to GitHub, never deletes your review, and only listens on localhost.

Quickstart

Needs Node.js 22 or later and git, on macOS or Linux. To look around first, run npx local-review and click Add the example projects: a made-up app reviewed across four repos.

npx local-review init my-feature   # create ~/.local-review/projects/my-feature/project.yaml
npx local-review                   # serve the UI on http://localhost:5622

Edit project.yaml to point at your repo, branch and stacks:

title: My feature
repos:
  - path: ~/code/my-service
    branch: me/my-feature        # the range ends at this branch's head
    base: origin/main            # and starts at its merge-base with this
    stacks:
      - title: Groundwork
      - title: The feature itself
        starts_at: "Add the feature flag"   # the subject of the commit the stack starts at

Then open http://localhost:5622. Edits are picked up live. The full walk-through is the Quickstart.

To keep it running in the background, started at login (a LaunchAgent on macOS, a systemd user unit on Linux):

npm i -g local-review
local-review service install

See Run it as a service.

Upgrading from before 0.2.0? The default port was 5000; it's now 5622 (macOS uses 5000 for AirPlay). Update bookmarks and agent prompts, or run npx local-review --port 5000.

For agents

To have your coding agent set up a project, point it at the running server's llms.txt:

Read http://localhost:5622/llms.txt and create a local-review project for my feature-xyz branch on ~/code/my-git-project

It has the rules, the recipe, the commented project.yaml example and this machine's data directory and projects (llms.txt; the docs site has a copy at https://local-review.edspencer.net/llms.txt). Then

npx local-review guide

prints the guide for coding agents driving Local Review from the repo they work on: the data model, how to answer review threads, fix a commit mid-stack, tag branches, publish stacked PRs and record merges. It's AGENT-GUIDE.md in this repo, and on the docs site. To hand a reviewed project to your agent, paste the hand-off prompt.

Documentation

https://local-review.edspencer.net

• Getting started: Quickstart · Installation · Run it as a service
• Concepts: Projects & repos · PR stacks · Readiness · Landed PRs · Follow-on stacks · Linked projects · Following rebases
• Using it: A tour of the UI · Reviewing & comments · Editing PR text · Stack pictures · Keyboard shortcuts
• For agents: Agent guide · llms.txt ·

Guarantees

• Read-only: it never fetches, checks out, commits or rebases; all git access to your repos goes through one read-only allow-list. Read-only guarantee
• Never deletes: your review lives in ~/.local-review, never in your repos; writes are atomic, nothing is unlinked, and it's snapshotted hourly. Never-delete guarantee
• Localhost only: it binds 127.0.0.1 and rejects non-localhost Host and Origin headers. Localhost security

And so you can't mistake it for github.com, its header is deep plum with an amber underline and a "not on GitHub" pill.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md, and AGENTS.md for coding agents working on this repo. Report vulnerabilities privately as described in SECURITY.md. How AI was used to build it: AI-DECLARATION.md. Releases: RELEASING.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.

The fonts bundled in server/fonts/ for the stack picture are Inter and JetBrains Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (server/fonts/*-OFL.txt). npm dependencies keep their own licenses.