Getting Started

Lerd is a local PHP development environment for Linux and macOS, with Windows supported through WSL2. It runs Nginx, PHP-FPM and your services as rootless Podman containers, so there is no Docker daemon, no sudo for day to day work, and nothing installed system wide.

If you just want a site running, read Requirements and then Installation. Together they take a few minutes.

Install

• Requirements covers the supported distributions and the handful of packages lerd expects to find.
• Installation is the main path, a single install script that sets up directories, the container network, DNS and certificates.
• Windows (WSL2, beta) explains the systemd and mirrored networking setup Windows needs, most of which lerd wsl:setup does for you.
• NixOS documents the flake based route for immutable and declarative systems.
• Quick Start is the short version once lerd is installed: link a directory, get a .test domain with HTTPS.

Framework walkthroughs

Lerd detects your framework from the project itself and configures workers, environment wiring and health checks from a versioned store definition rather than hardcoded rules.

• Laravel
• Symfony
• WordPress
• Containers (Node, Python, Go, …) for stacks that are not PHP at all.

Add-ons and context

• Services adds MongoDB, phpMyAdmin, Redis and the rest of the service presets.
• Comparison sets lerd against Herd, Laragon, DDEV, Lando and Sail.
• Laragon for Linux is aimed at people moving over from Windows.

Once you are set up, Usage covers day to day site management and Features covers the web UI, TUI, MCP server and the rest.