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name: portal-guide-overview description: Nested lingtai-portal-guide reference for portal purpose, opening the browser view, and the .portal/ directory layout. version: 1.0.0 last_changed_at: "2026-07-18T00:00:00Z" maintenance: "If you find stale or incorrect information here, use the lingtai-issue-report skill to assemble evidence and obtain per-issue human consent before filing an issue. Never include secrets, credentials, tokens, or private paths."

Portal overview

This is a nested lingtai-portal-guide reference. It covers what the portal is, how to open it, and which files it writes under .lingtai/.portal/.

What is the portal

lingtai-portal is a Go binary that:

1. Reads the same .lingtai/ directory as the TUI (filesystem-native, no separate database).
2. Snapshots the network topology every 3 seconds into a JSONL tape.
3. Serves a web UI for live network visualization and historical replay.
4. Listens on a random port, stored in .lingtai/.portal/port.

Opening the portal

Read .lingtai/.portal/port to get the port number, then open http://localhost:<port> in a browser. If that file does not exist, the portal is not running — the user can start it with lingtai-portal.

.portal/ directory

.lingtai/.portal/
├── topology.jsonl              # Live tape — one JSON frame per line
├── replay/
│   └── chunks/
│       ├── manifest.json           # Chunk metadata (start/end timestamps, frame counts)
│       ├── <hour-bucket>.json.gz   # Delta-encoded, gzipped hourly chunks
│       └── ...
└── reconstruct.progress        # Transient: "current/total" during reconstruction

Use the topology-and-api reference for the data formats inside those files.