LaunchDeck

A lightweight macOS launchd service manager — scan, inspect, and control LaunchDaemons / LaunchAgents from a clean, fast native GUI.

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macOS has no built-in GUI for managing launchd services — launchctl is powerful but unfriendly, and third-party services scattered across LaunchDaemons / LaunchAgents directories are hard to keep track of. LaunchDeck gives you a single window to see every service on your Mac, what's running, what auto-starts, and full control to start / stop / restart / safely delete them.

Built with Tauri 2 + React + Rust: a tiny bundle, near-zero idle footprint, and all platform logic behind a Rust-side backend.

Features

• Full service scan — statically scans 5 plist directories (/System/Library/LaunchDaemons, /System/Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/LaunchAgents, ~/Library/LaunchAgents) and merges in live runtime state parsed from launchctl print (system / gui / user domains), including PID and last exit code
• Search & filter — search by label; filter by source (system / third-party), status (running / stopped), and auto-start behavior (RunAtLoad / KeepAlive)
• Favorites — star frequently-used services, pinned to the top of the list
• Start / Stop / Restart — the app waits for launchctl to actually converge to the new state before refreshing, so the UI never shows a stale status right after an operation
• Delete with backup — deleting a service unloads it, backs up its plist (plus metadata) to a local backup store, and only then removes the original file. A built-in backup manager lets you restore, delete, or clear backups at any time
• SIP-aware safety — system-critical services under /System/Library cannot be deleted (disabled in the UI and rejected in the backend)
• Service details — label, domain, status + PID, last exit code, RunAtLoad / KeepAlive, plist path, program, the full plist key/value table, and the raw launchctl print output
• Bilingual UI — Simplified Chinese and English, auto-detected from your system language, switchable in the toolbar
• Dark theme

How It Works

• Service status is always queried live via launchctl print <domain> — there is no local state cache, so what you see is what launchd sees.
• Because launchctl write operations are asynchronous (the command returns before the state changes), the backend polls until the service converges to the expected state (or times out) before reporting success.
• All platform logic lives behind a Rust-side ServiceBackend trait; the front end only calls Tauri commands and never touches platform APIs.

Permissions & Safety

• The app runs as a normal user application. Operations on your own user domain need no elevation.
• Writing to the system domain (services in /Library/LaunchDaemons) triggers the standard macOS administrator authorization dialog (via osascript); authorization is cached by the system for a few minutes.
• Delete is backup-first: the plist is copied to ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchDeck/backups/<timestamp>-<label>/ together with a meta.json; only after the copy succeeds is the original file removed. Incomplete backups are rolled back automatically.
• Restoring a backup to /Library uses an elevated copy to preserve root ownership, and refuses to overwrite the plist of a currently loaded service.
• Backup IDs are validated against path traversal; everything stays on your machine — no network, no telemetry.

Requirements

• macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later
• Apple Silicon (arm64). For Intel Macs, build a universal binary yourself (see below).

Install

1. Download LaunchDeck_<version>_arm64.zip from the latest release.

2. Unzip and drag LaunchDeck.app into Applications.

3. First launch — the app is ad-hoc signed and not notarized (no paid Apple Developer account), so macOS blocks it once. Either run:

   xattr -cr /Applications/LaunchDeck.app

   or double-click the app and click Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

4. Launch and enjoy. This step is only needed once.

Build from Source

Prerequisites: Node.js ≥ 18, pnpm, and the Rust toolchain via rustup (macOS target included by default). See Tauri's prerequisites for details.

# install dependencies
pnpm install

# run in development (frontend + Rust hot reload)
pnpm tauri dev

# frontend type-check + production build
pnpm build

# build the macOS distribution package:
# tauri build (.app) → ad-hoc re-sign → codesign verify → zip in dist-app/
pnpm dist:macos

The release build targets arm64 only. To support Intel Macs, build with pnpm tauri build --target universal-apple-darwin (run rustup target add aarch64-apple-darwin x86_64-apple-darwin first).

If you have a paid Apple Developer account, you can set bundle.macOS.signingIdentity in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json to a Developer ID certificate and notarize the app, eliminating the Gatekeeper bypass step for end users.

Tech Stack

Layer	Choice
App shell	Tauri 2 (Rust backend, minimal capabilities: core + store)
Front end	React 18 + TypeScript + Vite, i18next (zh-CN / en)
Back end	Rust: launchctl process parsing, plist decoding, sys-locale, tauri-plugin-store
Architecture	ServiceBackend trait isolating platform logic; stateless real-time queries

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.