Share a local web preview
Publish a local web app or API through your session and preview it in a tile right beside the terminal that runs it.
You can take a web app running on your own machine and make it viewable inside your session — no deploy, no public URL of your own.
The most common use is sharing a live preview of something you're building: start your dev server, publish its port through taiku, and anyone in the session can open the running app in a tile right next to the terminal that drives it.
Expose a local port
Every session can publish a local port so the app behind it becomes viewable in the session. Your dev server's default port is published automatically, and you can publish others — one or several at once — when you start the session.
When the session starts, taiku lists the published ports next to the session links. From there, you and anyone in the session can open each one as a preview.
Choose who can publish
You decide how freely ports can be exposed, so you keep control over what's shared:
| Mode | Who can publish a port | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Managed (default) | You, plus anyone you've given admin access | Pair programming, teaching, anywhere you want to review what gets shared |
| Open | Anyone in the session | Demos, workshops, or working solo for the fastest path to a live preview |
In managed mode, only the ports you've published and ones an admin approves become previews; other requests are declined until you allow them. Open mode removes the approval step entirely. Whoever can manage ports can also stop exposing one at any time from the Tunnels panel.
The edit-refresh loop
Once a port is published, the preview behaves like the app is hosted normally — links, assets, and client-side routing all just work. Make a change in your editor, and the preview reflects it on the next reload.
Preview tiles include two refresh controls in their titlebar:
- Refresh reloads the page quickly and is right for most code changes.
- Hard refresh reloads everything from scratch. Reach for it after changing static assets or build output, or when you suspect a stale cache is showing outdated content.
Previews open in any browser with modern web support; if a browser can't run a preview, taiku shows a clear message instead of a broken page.
Preview tiles
You open a published port from the Tunnels panel, which lists every active port. Each one can open two ways:
As a tile — a full workspace pane, just like a terminal. Split your workspace so the preview sits next to the terminal running your dev server, and watch your output render as you type. Each tile has a minimal browser chrome with back, forward, reload, and open-in-tab buttons, and can be resized, rearranged, and renamed like any other tile.
As a browser tab — open the preview in a new tab for the full browser experience, with devtools, an address bar, and native navigation.
For most development, tiles are the best fit: you get a side-by-side view of your code running in the terminal and its result rendering in the preview, all in one session your collaborators can see at the same time.
Because workspaces are per-user, everyone can arrange their own layout. One person might tile two previews side by side to compare them, while another keeps a terminal maximized with a small preview in the corner. A full-stack layout might be a backend terminal, a frontend terminal, and a preview tile of the frontend — all updating live as you work.