Schools love to make it hard to enjoy things on the internet. On macOS, you often need some sort of proxy server running locally that forwards remote traffic. Issue is, sometimes this server hangs, etc. To help this, you can use a LaunchAgent, which is similar to a systemd unit file for macOS. Even then, the proxy can get stale, especially after closing and reopening the laptop.

To get around this, in the past I’d use unlicensed launchcontrol and direct clients to download this and show them the very specific tiny button required to reload the agent. People aren’t very good at learning tho and it caused some headaches.

To solve this issue, I hacked together this simple GUI application in SwiftUI (my first time using it!) that wrapped launchctl (the interface for launchd, which controls the agents). It provides two simple easy to use buttons, that allow restarting stale connections, and also parses the label names of the agents to create human readable names for the people that don’t know what com.sidestep.socksproxy means.