Monitor Your Activity in the Meridian Local Dashboard

Explore the local web dashboard that shows your active session, focus time, category breakdown, and full day timeline, updated in real time as you work.

Meridian includes a Next.js dashboard that gives you a live, browser-based view of everything the daemon is recording. It reads directly from ~/.meridian/meridian.db and updates in real time as new sessions are written — no refresh needed, no cloud sync required. Open it at any point during your day to see exactly how you’ve been spending your time, broken down by app, category, and minute.

Opening the dashboard

The dashboard starts automatically when you run meridian start and listens on port 3000. To open it, navigate to:

http://localhost:3000

Any browser works. You can keep it open as a background tab while you work.

Dashboard views

The dashboard has three main views accessible from the navigation bar.

Home

The home page (/) is your at-a-glance summary of the current workday. It contains four sections:

Active Session Card

Shows the app currently in focus, how long it has been active, and the top window titles seen in this session. Updates on each daemon poll cycle (every 60 seconds).

Daily Stats

Summarises today’s total focus time, idle time, and away (sleep) time alongside the total session count. Useful for a quick productivity pulse check.

Category Breakdown

A horizontal bar chart showing how your focus time is distributed across activity categories. Each bar is color-coded to match the timeline below.

Day Timeline

A scrollable, chronological view of every session today, rendered as color-coded segments. Idle gaps and system sleep periods appear as distinct visual breaks.

Sessions list

Navigate to /sessions to see every completed session for the current day, ordered newest-first with pagination. Each card shows the app name, start and end time, duration, top window titles, assigned category, and confidence score.

Apps view

Navigate to /apps to see all-time usage statistics aggregated by application: total time, session count, average session length, and the last time each app was seen. A focus donut chart at the top highlights your top apps by cumulative time.

Activity categories

Meridian classifies each session into one of ten fixed categories. Each category has a distinct color used consistently across the timeline, the category breakdown chart, and every session card:

Category	Description
coding	Active development in an editor or IDE
code_review	Pull request review, diff reading
meeting	Video calls, conferencing apps
communication	Messaging, email
design	Design tools such as Figma
documentation	Writing docs, wikis, notes
planning	Roadmapping, ticket grooming, project management tools
deployment_devops	CI/CD, terminal, infrastructure work
research	Browser research, reading
idle_personal	Idle periods or non-work apps

Staying up to date

The dashboard sidebar shows the version of Meridian you have installed today, read from ~/.meridian/app/VERSION. When a newer release is published, it also surfaces a one-click update prompt so you don’t have to drop into a terminal to find out.

The update banner

On each load, the dashboard asks the local server for the installed version and compares it against the latest @meridiona/meridian release on npm. When a newer version exists, the sidebar swaps the version label for an Update available vX → vY banner with an Update now button. When you’re already on the latest version, the sidebar just shows the current version with no banner.

The version check is best-effort and never blocks the dashboard:

• Results are cached in memory for one hour, so the banner won’t flicker between page loads.
• The npm lookup has a five-second timeout. If it fails — for example, on a machine with no internet access — the sidebar simply shows the current version with no banner. There is no error toast and nothing to dismiss.

Clicking Update now

Clicking Update now does not run the update inside the dashboard process. The update restarts the background daemons and may prompt for your password to write to a privileged npm prefix, so it has to be visible and interactive.

Instead, the button asks the local server to launch a new Terminal window and run:

meridian update

Watch the Terminal window for progress — it will fetch the new package from npm, swap in the new binaries, and restart the launchd services. The dashboard tab will pick up the new version on its next reload.

If the Terminal window doesn’t open (for example, if you’ve disabled Terminal access for your browser), the response also includes the raw command so you can copy and run it yourself.

The dashboard only reads the npm registry for the version check and only launches Terminal locally. It never installs anything itself and never stores your password or any npm credentials.

Logs and maintenance

To tail the dashboard’s log output:

meridian logs ui

If you’ve pulled an update to the repository and want to rebuild the dashboard with the latest changes:

cd ui && npm run build

Then restart Meridian to pick up the new build:

meridian restart

The dashboard reads directly from ~/.meridian/meridian.db. It does not make any network requests and does not send your activity data anywhere. All rendering happens locally in your browser.

Troubleshooting

http://localhost:3000 returns an error or doesn't load

Check that the UI service is running:

meridian status

If the UI service is not listed as running, restart all services:

meridian restart

Then tail the UI log to see any startup errors:

meridian logs ui

The active session card shows stale data

The daemon writes new data every 60 seconds (configurable via POLL_INTERVAL_SECS). If the card hasn’t updated in longer than a minute or two, check that the daemon is running with meridian status and review the daemon log with meridian logs.

The dashboard was installed without the UI (--no-ui flag)

If you ran ./install.sh --no-ui, the dashboard was not built. Build and register it now:

cd ui && npm run build
meridian restart