StackPilot

Your local development control center for VS Code.

StackPilot detects the Django, FastAPI, and React + Vite projects in your workspace, then gives you native VS Code commands to run, inspect, and manage them — so day-to-day development stops living in a terminal tab.

Detect your services. Start and stop them. Check project health. Run framework operations. Scaffold new projects. All without leaving the editor.

Key features

Run your stack

Start, stop, and restart detected Django, FastAPI, and Vite dev servers as processes StackPilot owns and tracks — live status in the tree, dashboard, and status bar, output in dedicated terminals, and optional auto-restart after an unexpected crash.

Understand your project

Read-only, automatic detection of your backend framework, frontend tooling, Python interpreter/virtual environment, and package manager. A Project Health view surfaces issues like a missing interpreter, uninstalled dependencies, or pending Django migrations.

Work with your framework

Full Django tooling — migrations, Django shell, database shell, superuser creation, app scaffolding, tests, dependency install, and any manage.py command — plus generic frontend operations (install, build, test, run any script) for a detected Vite/Node project.

Create projects

Scaffold a new Django, FastAPI, or standalone React + Vite project from a single wizard, with presets for adding a Vite + React (optionally TypeScript) frontend to a Python backend.

Stay inside VS Code

A dedicated dashboard tab, an activity-bar tree view, a Command Palette entry for every action, debug configuration generation, and Django/frontend tests in VS Code's native Testing panel.

Supported stacks

Frontend tooling works with npm, pnpm, yarn, or bun, detected from your lockfile.

Quick start

1. Open a workspace containing a supported project — StackPilot detects it automatically.
2. Open the dashboard (Ctrl+Alt+D / Cmd+Alt+D) or use the StackPilot view in the Activity Bar.
3. Start everything with Start All (Ctrl+Alt+R / Cmd+Alt+R), or start each side individually.

Every action is also available from the Command Palette as StackPilot: ….

Starting from scratch? Run StackPilot: New Project… and choose Django, FastAPI, or React + Vite.

Project creation

The New Project wizard scaffolds a real project on disk: a virtual environment and Django/FastAPI project for a Python backend, a Vite frontend when you add one, a .gitignore, README, and minimal .vscode/settings.json — with a review step before anything is created.

• Django — plain, or paired with a Vite + React frontend (JavaScript or TypeScript), optionally with Django REST Framework.
• FastAPI — plain, or paired with a Vite + React + TypeScript frontend.
• React + Vite — a standalone frontend project, no backend.

Project health

StackPilot checks your Python interpreter, framework dependencies (Django or FastAPI), Node dependencies/package manager, and — for Django — pending migrations. Results appear in the tree's Diagnostics section and the dashboard's Project Health panel.

Local-first

StackPilot is a local development tool. It doesn't deploy anything, doesn't touch production infrastructure, and doesn't send data anywhere. It only ever stops processes it started itself, and every setting that affects what gets executed is a restricted configuration under Workspace Trust.

Settings

Settings live under stackPilot.* (backend/frontend directories, ports, package manager, auto-restart, and more), are workspace-scoped, and are searchable from VS Code's Settings UI.

Known limitations

• FastAPI support currently covers detection, start/stop, and project health — it doesn't yet have Django-equivalent tooling (migrations, shell, dependency install) or debug configuration generation.
• Testing panel integration is whole-suite, not per-test.
• Automatic dependency-installed detection checks whether the framework package is importable, not whether requirements.txt exactly matches what's installed; Poetry/uv/Pipenv projects are detected but not auto-installed.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full picture.

Development

npm install
npm run compile
npm test

Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host. See docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for the full workflow and docs/TESTING.md for how the test suite is structured.

License

MIT. See CHANGELOG.md for release notes.