DEV Community: Miles Hilliard

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Miles Hilliard — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:41:12 +0000

Miles Hilliard

May 16

countapi.xyz is dead. Here's the drop-in replacement I found (and actually use)

#webdev #javascript #opensource #beginners

4 min read

I made a simple WireGuard GUI for Linux (that works)

Miles Hilliard — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:40:46 +0000

If you’ve ever used WireGuard on Linux, you already know it’s great… until you actually have to use it daily.

It’s fast, stable, super clean under the hood — but managing configs through the terminal gets old pretty quickly.

So I ended up building something I wish already existed: a simple GUI for WireGuard on Linux.

PyPI: wireguard-gui on PyPI
GitHub: wireguard-gui on GitHub

What it is

It’s a lightweight GUI wrapper around WireGuard tools like wg and wg-quick.

It doesn’t try to replace WireGuard or re-invent networking. It just makes it easier to:

see your configs
connect/disconnect tunnels
switch between profiles
check status without opening a terminal

Basically: click button → VPN works.

Why I built it

I was using WireGuard daily across different networks (home, dev stuff, random testing environments), and I kept running into the same annoying pattern:

open terminal
type command
forget which config was active
check status again
repeat forever

It wasn’t broken… just friction-heavy.

At some point I just thought:
“why isn’t there a simple GUI for this already?”

So I made one.

What it can do

Right now it supports:

listing WireGuard configs on the system
connecting / disconnecting tunnels
showing current active state
switching between multiple profiles
working directly with system WireGuard configs (no weird duplication)

It’s intentionally simple. I didn’t want it turning into a full network manager.

How it works

Under the hood, it just wraps existing WireGuard tools.

No custom VPN stack.
No kernel tricks.
No replacement daemon.

If Linux can already do it, I just call it from Python and present it in a UI.

That keeps it lightweight and (hopefully) less fragile than bigger “network manager replacement” type tools.

Install

pip install wireguard-gui

Then just run it from your terminal or application launcher depending on your setup.

What I learned building it

A few things surprised me:

WireGuard itself is way easier to work with than most GUI tools make it look
permissions are the real pain point, not networking
most “VPN GUI problems” are just bad state handling
Linux desktop environments behave very differently (this was fun… and painful)

Also, Snap packaging makes everything slightly more chaotic than it should be (but it works).

What’s next

This is still early, but I want to improve it with:

system tray support (probably the biggest quality-of-life upgrade)
auto-reconnect on network change
better status visibility (handshake timing, latency, etc)
smoother onboarding for new configs
maybe Flatpak support

Not trying to bloat it — just remove friction.

Why release it publicly

Honestly, I think small tools like this are worth sharing even if they’re not “perfect”.

A lot of Linux tooling is either:

super powerful but CLI-only
or overly complex GUI suites

This sits in the middle: simple, focused, and just enough UI to make life easier.

Even if only a handful of people use it, that’s still useful.

If you try it

Feedback is honestly the most useful thing right now.

Especially stuff like:

what distro you’re on
what broke (if anything)
weird permission issues
UI annoyances

Even small notes help a lot.

countapi.xyz is dead. Here's the drop-in replacement I found (and actually use)

Miles Hilliard — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:37:27 +0000

If you've been using countapi.xyz for page view tracking, button click counters, or really anything that just needed a simple number that goes up... you've probably noticed it's gone. No announcement, no migration guide, just a dead URL.

And honestly, it was one of those APIs that was so useful precisely because it asked nothing of you. No account. No API key. No SDK to install. Just fetch a URL and get a number back. It was perfect.

So when it died, a lot of people were left hunting for alternatives. Most of what I found either required signing up, had weird rate limits buried in the fine print, or was just overkill for what is fundamentally a very simple problem.

Then I found countapi.mileshilliard.com and it's basically exactly what we lost.

What it is

It's a free, open source counting API built as a direct spiritual successor to countapi.xyz. No signup. No API keys. No headers. You just hit an endpoint and it gives you a number.

The whole thing runs on a Python serverless backend with Redis, and it's hosted on OCI with near 99% uptime (there's a public UptimeRobot dashboard you can check yourself).

The concept is dead simple: every counter is identified by a unique key. That's it. You pick a key name, and the API tracks a number against it. Since there are no namespaces like the original had, you just want to make your key specific enough that nobody else is going to accidentally share it, something like johns-blog-homepage-visits rather than just visits.

The endpoints

There are really only three you'll ever use:

Hit (increment by +1)

GET /api/v1/hit/your_key

{
  "key": "your_key",
  "message": "Key updated successfully",
  "value": "42"
}

Get (read without incrementing)

GET /api/v1/get/your_key

{
  "key": "your_key",
  "message": "Key requested successfully",
  "value": "42"
}

Set (jump to a specific value)

GET /api/v1/set/your_key?value=100

{
  "key": "your_key",
  "message": "Key set successfully",
  "old_value": "42",
  "value": "100"
}

That's the whole API. There's also /api/v1/status and /health if you want to ping it for monitoring purposes.

Using it in practice

Adding a page view counter to any site is maybe 5 lines of JavaScript:

<p>This page has been visited <span id="visits">...</span> times.</p>

<script>
  fetch('https://countapi.mileshilliard.com/api/v1/hit/my-site-homepage')
    .then(res => res.json())
    .then(data => {
      document.getElementById('visits').textContent = data.value;
    });
</script>

If you're on a platform that doesn't allow JavaScript at all (like certain Notion pages or some README renderers), there's even a tracking pixel approach:

<img src="https://countapi.mileshilliard.com/api/v1/hit/my-site-visits" style="display:none;" alt="" />

No JS required. The hit happens server-side when the image loads.

Migrating from countapi.xyz

If you were using countapi.xyz, your old calls probably looked like this:

fetch('https://api.countapi.xyz/hit/mysite.com/visits')

The new equivalent is:

fetch('https://countapi.mileshilliard.com/api/v1/hit/mysite-visits')

The main difference is there are no namespaces anymore, so you fold your old namespace and key together into one unique key. Everything else works the same way.

A few things worth knowing

All keys are public. Anyone who knows your key name can read or hit your counter. This is by design and is the tradeoff for having zero auth overhead. Just don't use it to store anything sensitive (not that a number really could be, but still).

Keys don't expire. If you want to "reset" a counter, use the /set endpoint or just start using a new key name.

There is rate limiting, though the docs describe it as "extremely generous." Someone apparently stress tested it without warning, which is how rate limiting got added in the first place. The docs have a great line about this: "Shoot me an email before you try to... if you wouldn't mind."

It's open source. The whole thing is on GitHub at syntaxerror019/countapi if you want to self-host or contribute.

Why I like it

There are absolutely fancier analytics tools out there. But sometimes you really do just want a number that goes up. This API gets that. It doesn't ask you to create an account to track 12 page views on your personal blog. It doesn't require you to read 40 pages of docs. It just works.

The fact that it's a community project filling a gap that a commercial service left behind makes it even better. If you end up using it, maybe give the repo a star or drop the maintainer a note. Small projects like this run on that kind of encouragement.

Links:

Site: countapi.mileshilliard.com
GitHub: github.com/syntaxerror019/countapi
Uptime dashboard: linked from the site nav