Native Apps & Logs

The devx ecosystem provides a unified execution and logging layer that effortlessly bridges containerized databases and native host processes running locally on your Mac.

Rather than forcing every part of your application stack into a heavy Dockerfile from day one, devx introduces the Process Bridge.

Native Execution (devx run)

For APIs or frontends that you run natively on your machine (like npm run dev or go run main.go), you can prefix the command with devx run.

devx run natively executes your command exactly as you typed it, but intercepts the stdout/stderr streams and routes them securely into the internal devx log multiplexer.

# Provide a readable label to the process
devx run --name my-api -- npm run dev

# Or simply let devx infer the name
devx run go run main.go

Unified Multiplexer (devx logs)

Once you have Native and Containerized components running in the background, keeping track of them across 10 terminal tabs becomes chaotic.

devx logs completely solves this by acting as a single, centralized message broker.

devx logs

When started, it automatically discovers:

1. All native host processes started via devx run
2. All running Podman containers and databases spawning inside the devx VM

It combines their standard output into a beautifully color-coded Bubble Tea Terminal UI, prefixing each line dynamically so you can visually trace a single user request as it hits the Cloudflare Tunnel, routes to your native Node.js process on Mac, and queries the containerized Postgres database—all in one window.

AI Agent Support

Because beautifully rendered Terminal UI components (ANSI characters, colors, and interactive viewports) break the context windows of AI Agents interacting with the CLI, devx logs implements a strict fallback mode via the global --json flag.

devx logs --json

This bypasses the TUI completely, instructing the internal streaming daemon to continuously tail and flush deterministic, machine-readable JSON lines for agents to consume directly.