~/.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 runmeridian start and listens on port 3939. To open it, navigate to:
MERIDIAN_UI_PORT in ~/.meridian/app/.env, then meridian restart.
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 |
Logs and maintenance
To tail the dashboard’s log output:meridian update runs npm install -g @meridiona/meridian@latest under the hood and re-runs meridian setup. Source-built contributors rebuild manually with cd ui && npm run 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:3939 returns an error or doesn't load
http://localhost:3939 returns an error or doesn't load
Check that the UI service is running:If the UI service is not listed as running, restart all services:Then tail the UI log to see any startup errors:
The active session card shows stale data
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 (source builds with --no-ui)
The dashboard was installed without the UI (source builds with --no-ui)
If you built from source with The npm distribution always includes a prebuilt dashboard, so this only applies to source-built contributors.
./install.sh --no-ui, the dashboard was skipped. Build and register it now: