The menubar manager

The manager is the Lodekit icon in your menu bar — the only piece of Lodekit that looks like a Mac app. It has one job: keep the platform running. It starts Lodekit when you launch it, watches over it while you work, and gives you the on/off switches.

It’s also self-contained. Lodekit.app carries everything it needs to run the platform, including its own private copy of Node — it installs nothing system-wide and touches nothing else on your Mac. Everything you actually use is the dashboard in your browser; the menubar is just the supervisor.

The tray menu

Click the menubar icon and you get:

• Status line — what Lodekit is doing right now: starting while it boots, then running. You’ll see stopped after you stop it yourself, or error if something went wrong.
• Dashboard — opens the dashboard in your browser.
• Settings — opens the dashboard straight to its Settings page.
• Launch at Login — start Lodekit automatically when you log in to your Mac. This toggle and the one in the dashboard’s Settings → General are the same switch: change either and the other follows. If you change it in macOS System Settings instead, the system’s choice wins and Lodekit adopts it.
• Start / Stop / Restart — the power switches. Stop shuts the platform down; Start brings it back; Restart does both in one go.
• Quit Lodekit — quits the manager and stops the platform with it.

If something goes wrong

Lodekit never restarts itself behind your back. If the platform crashes, the status line switches to error and stays there until you choose Restart — so a problem is always visible, never silently looping. Before restarting, it’s worth a glance at the Logs view (or ask your agent to look) to see what happened.

Quitting

Quitting the manager stops everything: the dashboard and your apps are unavailable until you launch Lodekit.app again. Nothing is lost — your apps and data sit safely in your Lodekit folder — they’re just not being served. If you’d rather never think about it, turn on Launch at Login and Lodekit is simply always there.

One more thing you can shape from outside an app’s code: how everything looks. That’s Theming.