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.

Start here

Three pages, in order, and you have a site running.

• 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.
• Quick Start is the short version once lerd is installed: link a directory, get a .test domain with HTTPS.

Already running an older lerd? Updating from before 1.26 covers the one release that needs a manual step.

Platform guides

The install script covers mainstream Linux and macOS on its own. These pages are for the systems that need something extra, or that have their own integration worth knowing about.

• Omarchy is the Arch and Hyprland desktop, with the crun and nss prerequisites, the systemd-resolved detail and the lerd bar widget.
• NixOS documents the flake based route for immutable and declarative systems.
• Windows (WSL2, beta) explains the systemd and mirrored networking setup Windows needs, most of which lerd wsl:setup does for you.

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.

The sidebar also carries walkthroughs for Drupal, TYPO3, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Statamic, Tempest and Magento.

Coming from another tool

Each of these is a migration guide, not just a feature table: what the equivalent command is, and how to move your projects and databases across.

• Comparison sets lerd against Herd, Laragon, Laradock, DDEV, Lando and Sail in one place.
• Laravel Herd for Linux is aimed at people who used Herd on a Mac and moved to Linux.
• Laragon for Linux is aimed at people moving over from Windows.
• Laradock alternative is for people leaving a per-project Docker Compose stack behind.
• Laravel Sail alternative is the one with an automated importer, lerd import sail, database and S3 files included.

Add-ons

• Services adds MongoDB, phpMyAdmin, Redis and the rest of the service presets.

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