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Pipebase

Local dev loop

The designer can spin up a throwaway runtime on your own machine and keep it in sync with your edits — no remote runtime, no manual deploy step, while you’re building a flow.

What it does

Section titled “What it does”

With the local dev loop enabled, the next-editor (/edit-next/:id) shows a runtime panel in the topbar with Start / Stop and an “Auto-deploy on save” toggle:

  1. Start local runtime — the designer backend pulls the runtime image if it isn’t already on your Docker host, runs it as a throwaway container, health-checks it, and registers it as a runtime.
  2. Auto-deploy on save — every Save that produces valid YAML redeploys to that local runtime automatically (debounced), so edit → save → see it running is one loop instead of edit → save → switch to Runtimes → deploy.
  3. Run — fires the trigger against the local runtime and lights up each node on the canvas with the real per-step request/response body, the same live-trace mechanism used against remote runtimes.
  4. Stop — tears the container down and deregisters it.

Enabling it

Section titled “Enabling it”

Set PIPEBASE_LOCAL_DEV=true on the designer backend:

Terminal window
PIPEBASE_LOCAL_DEV=true pnpm -C designer dev

When the flag is unset (the default), the local-runtime API routes return 404 and the panel doesn’t render — it feature-detects and hides itself.

Never set this on an internet-exposed designer. The local dev loop starts Docker containers on whatever host the designer backend runs on, with no additional auth beyond the normal /api/* gate. It’s meant for a developer’s own machine, not a shared or public deployment.

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