A few days ago, I introduced Repo-rter—a local-first desktop app built with Next.js and Tauri v2 to bypass GitHub’s annoying 14-day traffic history limit.
While the launch was successful, we quickly hit some critical architectural bottlenecks in production. In our latest v0.4.1 release, we completely refactored the data layer.
Here is a technical breakdown of how we migrated from WebView localStorage to a native file-system cache, bypassed API rate limits, and implemented automatic data purging.
In our initial release, we relied on the browser-level localStorage inside the WebView to store merged historical traffic logs. This was a bad engineering decision for three reasons:
OS Cache Purging: WebView storage is tied to browser caches. On macOS and Windows, if the system disk runs low, the OS daemon (cache_delete) can automatically purge WebView folders without warning. Cache-cleaning utilities (like CCleaner or CleanMyMac) also wipe these out.
