Show HN: Pbar.io – Distributed progress bars that work in terminals and browsers
5 clav88 2 9/11/2025, 10:13:01 PM pbar.io ↗
I built pbar.io because I was tired of SSH'ing into servers to check if my data processing scripts were still running, or worse, having them finish/crash without knowing.
It's a simple REST API that lets you create and update progress bars from anywhere. The same progress bar can be viewed as terminal output (with ANSI colors), in a browser, or consumed as JSON.
I'm actually tracking this HN discussion with pbar. The progress bar increases with each comment - watch it live as we discuss!
Web: https://pbar.io/Y8yg3BG Terminal: curl https://pbar.io/api/bars/Y8yg3BG
More features that emerged from my own use cases: - Hierarchical progress bars (parent bars auto-aggregate children) - Python package (pip install pbar-io) that wraps tqdm - just swap the import - QR codes to monitor progress on your phone while away from desk - No auth required for quick prototypes
Curious what use cases you might have for this!
I must admit that idea behind this project is nice, but I'm not going to get dependent on someone else's infrastructure (and I think I'm not the only one thinking that way), can I host it myself or is the source not available? I don't see any links to sources or github, so decided to just ask here (and to also make the 1st comment here to see if your link would work now).
I'm happy to clean up the source a bit and put it on GitHub if people like it and prefer to it themselves. I thought I'd host it myself under a short, memorable domain, so people can easily try it out and share short links to their progress bars.