Local PHP development that just works. Run lerd link and your project is live at project.test with HTTPS. No Docker, no sudo, no system pollution.

Open-source, Herd-like local PHP development for Linux and macOS, with Windows via WSL2 (beta). Nginx, PHP-FPM, and your services run as rootless Podman containers, fronted by a built-in Web UI, a btop-style terminal dashboard, a full CLI, and an MCP server so your AI assistant can drive the whole thing from chat.

curl -fsSL https://lerd.sh/install.sh | bash

Works with Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Drupal, CakePHP, Statamic, and any custom PHP framework.

• 🌐 Automatic .test domains with one-command TLS, or opt out and use *.localhost with no system resolver tweak
• 🐘 Per-project PHP (8.1 to 8.5) switched with one click, plus a per-site FrankenPHP runtime with Laravel Octane and Symfony Runtime
• 🖥️ Built-in Web UI with live dashboards, a Cmd+K command palette, in-browser editing of nginx, php.ini, and .env, and fourteen languages
• 🛰️ Debug window that streams every dump() and dd() to the dashboard, plus SQL with N+1 and slow-query detection, mail, jobs, events, and outgoing HTTP, on Laravel and Symfony
• 🔥 SPX profiler — one click turns every request into a flame graph, no FPM restart and no code changes
• 🩺 Site doctor with framework-agnostic health checks and one-click fixes, in the UI, the TUI, the CLI, and MCP
• 📈 Request timing that charts response times and the slowest routes from your site's own traffic, with a click to profile the route that stands out
• 🐚 Tinker in the browser, a REPL against your running application, and a terminal dashboard for everything you would rather not leave the shell for
• 🗄️ One-click services: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Meilisearch, Mailpit, and more, each a versioned YAML preset you can update, migrate, or reset in place
• 💾 Databases you can hand around: export, import, and snapshots you can roll back to, next to bucket and mail management in the same dashboard
• ⚡ Native runtime on macOS, where PHP-FPM, the CLI and the workers run on the host instead of crossing the VM boundary for every file
• 📶 Share a site over the LAN with your phone or a colleague's laptop, loopback URLs in the page rewritten so the other device can follow them
• 🔔 Desktop notifications and a system tray for failed jobs, slow routes, captured mail and the environment's state, without a tab open
• 😴 Idle-suspend, which stops a quiet site's workers and brings them back on the next request, so a machine full of projects costs what you are actually using
• 🌳 First-class git worktrees with auto-detected branch domains, per-worktree PHP and Node versions, and optional database isolation
• 🤖 MCP server so Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and other assistants scaffold projects, run migrations, and manage services from chat
• 🔒 Rootless and daemonless, Podman-native, no Docker required, dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6

lerd-env is the home for Lerd's community and distribution repos.

• lerd, the main project: the CLI, the Web UI, the MCP server, and everything else.
• lerd-desktop, the desktop app: a native window around the dashboard with native desktop notifications, shipped as a Flatpak, pairing with Lerd running on your machine.
• lerd-omarchy-glance, the Omarchy bar widget: sites, services, workers and container resources in the Quattro bar, quiet until something breaks, so the state of the environment is on screen without opening a tab.
• frameworks, the community framework store. Every lerd link pulls a matching definition from here, so a new PHP framework gains full support by editing YAML, no Lerd release required.
• services, the community service-preset store. Databases, caches, search engines, and admin dashboards, all as versioned YAML that ships without a binary release.
• lerd-nixos, the NixOS flake. Packages the binary and ships the configuration.nix blocks the stack needs to run Lerd declaratively.
• php, the static PHP builds behind the native runtime on macOS: an interpreter per supported version, for sites served straight on the host rather than in a container.
• homebrew-lerd, the Homebrew tap, for brew install lerd-env/lerd/lerd on macOS and Linux.
• lerd-deb, the Debian and Ubuntu packaging, published to the ppa:lerd/lerd Launchpad PPA.
• lerd-rpm, the Fedora packaging, published to COPR.

Read the docs at lerd.sh, join the community on Discord and r/lerd, and open a pull request. Adding a framework to the store is the easiest place to start.