Rork Local

A localhost, self-hosted take on Rork: a browser tab with a live iOS simulator, a Rork-style Publish flow, and App Store screenshot tooling. Open it in Cursor, Claude Code, or any browser-capable agent and iterate on your app end to end.

• Simulator streaming is powered by serve-sim by Evan Bacon (60 FPS stream, full touch/keyboard input, logs).
• Publishing and screenshots are powered by the asc CLI by Rudrank Riyam (asc publish, asc screenshots, asc web apps create).

The device switcher and simulator tools panels come from serve-sim.

Requirements

• macOS (Apple Silicon) with Xcode command line tools (xcrun simctl)
• Node.js 20+
• asc installed on your PATH, or set ASC_BIN=/path/to/asc
• asc auth login completed (publishing calls the App Store Connect API)
• For screenshot framing: pipx install "koubou==0.18.1" (used by asc screenshots frame)
• For creating brand-new apps: asc web auth login (app creation uses Apple's web API)

Run

From your app's directory:

npx rork-local
# → http://localhost:3131

Or from a checkout of this repo:

bun install
bun run build
bun start                            # scans the current directory
node dist/cli.js /path/to/app        # or point it at an app codebase

On startup the server:

1. Boots an iPhone simulator if none is booted (and opens Simulator.app).
2. Auto-detects publish settings from your app codebase (see below).
3. Starts the serve-sim streaming helper in the background.
4. Serves the UI on http://localhost:3131 with the simulator mounted at /.sim.

Screenshots and editor state live next to your app in <project>/.rork-local/; rork.config.json overrides are read from the directory you launch rork-local in (usually your app's directory).

Publish flow (Rork-style)

The Publish button opens a popover with an App Store section ("Submit this app's signed build to TestFlight and the App Store"). Submit to App Store opens a bottom-sheet wizard with three steps, modeled on Rork's publish dialog:

1. App Info — a Project field (edit it to re-point detection at another directory; the change is persisted to rork.config.json), plus App ID, version, IPA path, TestFlight/App Store destination, and beta groups. Everything auto-fills Xcode-style from the detected project. No app on App Store Connect yet? When the App ID field is empty, a Create new app link expands inline fields (App Name, Bundle ID, SKU) and runs asc web apps create — the new app ID drops straight into the form.
2. App Store Connect — checks both credentials: API key (publishing) via asc auth status, and Web session (app creation) via asc web auth status.
3. Submit — runs asc publish testflight|appstore and streams live progress ("Uploading to TestFlight", "Processing", …) plus the raw CLI log. You can close the sheet; the publish continues in the background.

Screenshots

The camera button in the top bar snaps the booted simulator (with a shutter flash). The screenshots panel lets you:

• Capture raw screenshots (xcrun simctl io booted screenshot)
• Frame them into Apple device bezels (asc screenshots frame, Koubou-powered; devices: iphone-air, iphone-17-pro, iphone-17-pro-max, iphone-17, iphone-16e), producing App-Store-ready sizes (e.g. 1206×2622 → IPHONE_61)
• Edit captures in the built-in slide editor: canvas presets for the App Store sizes (iPhone 6.9″/6.5″/6.1″, iPad 12.9″), solid or gradient backgrounds, a headline with color/size/position controls, and the capture composed in a clean device bezel you can drag and resize — with a deck strip to reorder, duplicate, and delete slides. Exports are pixel-exact PNGs validated against the chosen device type.
• Accept & Upload framed, raw, or editor-made slides to your App Store listing via asc screenshots upload --app … --version … --device-type …

Files live in .rork-local/screenshots/raw/, …/framed/, and …/listing/ inside your project.

Auto-detected defaults

The server continuously scans the project directory and pre-fills the forms:

• Bundle ID + version from app.json (Expo) or an Xcode project.pbxproj
• IPA path: the newest .ipa found in the project tree
• App Store Connect app ID: resolved from the bundle ID via asc apps list --bundle-id … (requires asc auth login)
• Beta groups: fetched via asc testflight groups list --app …

The project directory resolves in this order: CLI argument → RORK_PROJECT env → projectDir in rork.config.json → current working directory (an explicit per-invocation choice beats a persisted one). Change it live from the wizard's Project field.

Defaults

Pre-fill the forms by editing rork.config.json (values here always win over detection):

{
  "projectDir": "/path/to/my-app",
  "appId": "6759231657",
  "ipa": "/path/to/MyApp.ipa",
  "group": "External Testers",
  "version": "1.0.0"
}

ASC_APP_ID in the environment also pre-fills the app ID.

Environment

Variable	Purpose
PORT	HTTP port (default 3131)
ASC_BIN	Path to the asc binary
ASC_APP_ID	Default App Store Connect app ID
RORK_PROJECT	App codebase to auto-detect publish settings from (default: cwd)

Agent Skill

An Agent Skill ships in skills/rork-local — it teaches AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, and any host implementing the open Agent Skills standard) how to start rork-local from an app project and drive the whole flow over HTTP: status/detection, TestFlight and App Store publishing with SSE logs, screenshot capture/frame/upload, and first-publish app creation.

Install it in Claude Code via the plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add rorkai/rork-local
/plugin install rork-local

or in any Agent Skills-compatible tool:

bunx add-skill rorkai/rork-local
# or
npx skills add rorkai/rork-local

Agent-facing repo docs live in AGENTS.md (with CLAUDE.md symlinked to it), and a project-scoped dev skill for working on rork-local itself lives in .codex/skills/rork-local-dev.

Development

The server is TypeScript in src/. Bun is the dev/build toolchain (like serve-sim), but the published artifacts in dist/ target plain Node — users running the CLI via npx don't need Bun:

src/
  cli.ts          entry point (the published bin points at dist/cli.js)
  server.ts       route wiring + HTTP API + boot
  http.ts         router, static files, JSON bodies (on node:http, no framework)
  config.ts       paths, rork.config.json, asc binary resolution, project dir
  detect.ts       Xcode-style project detection + caching
  jobs.ts         single-job asc runner + SSE fan-out
  screenshots.ts  simctl capture, asc frame, shot listing
  sim.ts          simulator boot + serve-sim helper
  types.ts        shared API payload types

bun install
bun run build      # bun build → dist/ (node target) + tsc declarations
bun run dev        # run src/cli.ts directly under Bun
bun run format     # format frontend TypeScript/TSX with Prettier
bun run format:check
bun run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit
bun start          # node dist/cli.js (runs the built output)

The browser UI is maintained as React TSX + Tailwind CSS in frontend/. bun run build:frontend bundles it into static assets under public/; those generated assets are what the plain-Node server ships to npx rork-local users.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.