Lerd 1.37 is out.
The part I'm most happy about: a request now carries one id from nginx to PHP to the browser. Open a recent request and you see everything it ran on a timeline, including what the page itself reported back. Your AI assistant gets the same view over MCP, and it starts with what went wrong.
Services sleep when nothing uses them. A request to a sleeping site is held open until things are up, then gets the real response. Nothing ever sees a waking page.
The dashboard got a lot lighter, on a busy machine it went from over a gigabyte to under a hundred megabytes, because the debug buffer lives in SQLite now instead of memory.
Also in this one: fetch, pull, push and branch switching from the site header, with a database snapshot before you move. Secrets from 1Password, Doppler, Infisical and the rest without touching .env. DNS built into Lerd, no more dnsmasq. And a rebuilt TUI that draws in your terminal's own colours.
LerdPHP retweeted
Put my thoughts about migrating from Laravel Herd to Lerd into a blog post:
jonathanpurvis.co.uk/migrati…
Most PHP projects need more than PHP: a database, a cache, a mail catcher, search, object storage.
In lerd each of those is a service you add in a click: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Valkey, Memcached, Meilisearch, Typesense, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Mailpit, RustFS, RabbitMQ and more. Each runs as a rootless container, several versions can run side by side, and lerd writes their hosts, ports and credentials into your site's .env.
Presets live in a public store, so new services reach every install without waiting for a release.
#MySQL #PostgreSQL
"It works on my machine" stops being helpful when it doesn't work on your machine.
lerd's site doctor runs the health checks a site's framework defines, things like pending migrations, a missing app key, a broken storage link, an env file pointing at a service that isn't running, or a database that doesn't exist yet. Findings appear as each check finishes.
Where a fix is safe, it is one click away: create the missing database, start the service, repair the vhost. For the rest you get a clear explanation, or a "Copy for agent" button that hands the problem to your AI assistant.
#Laravel #PHP
Watch Claude Code set up a Laravel project, open a feature branch with its own database, and fix an N+1 query, all through Lerd. Every step shows up live in the dashboard. One take, no cuts.
Setup: from a fresh clone to https://shop.test with a trusted certificate, MySQL, Redis, migrations, seed data and Vite running as a worker.
Worktree: the feature branch gets its own HTTPS subdomain, a Vite worker and a database cloned from main, with the branch's new migration on top. Main stays untouched.
Debugging: Lerd's request inspector flags an N+1, 52 queries with 48 of them the same category lookup. Copy for agent hands it to Claude, which adds the eager load, and the next request runs 5 queries.
#Laravel #PHP
Your AI coding assistant is only as useful as what it can see and do. Lerd gives it the whole local environment.
Lerd ships an MCP server, and one switch in the dashboard registers it with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Windsurf, Junie and opencode. Through it the assistant can run artisan and composer on the right PHP version, start services and workers, read logs, inspect slow requests and set up git worktrees with the right database.
Instead of pasting error output into a chat, the assistant reads it directly.
#MCP #AI
Reviewing a pull request usually means stashing your work, switching branches, reinstalling dependencies and hoping the database still matches. git worktrees fix the checkout part. Lerd fixes the rest.
Every git worktree of a site becomes its own site, on its own HTTPS subdomain. Lerd installs its dependencies, builds its assets, starts its workers and sets up its database, then shows it as a tab next to main in the dashboard.
So main keeps running while the branch you are reviewing runs beside it, and you can click between the two.
#git #PHP
They're rootless Podman containers running as normal systemd services, so they behave like the rest of your Linux system.
Lerd is a free, open-source local PHP development environment for Linux and macOS, think Laravel Herd, built for people who also run Linux.
It runs nginx, PHP-FPM, your databases and services as rootless Podman containers, managed by systemd on Linux. There is no Docker daemon, nothing runs as root, and nothing is installed into your system PHP or your package manager's paths, so uninstalling leaves a clean machine.
You get .test domains with trusted HTTPS, every PHP version side by side, a web dashboard, a terminal UI, a CLI and an MCP server for your AI assistant.
#PHP #Laravel
Syntax is giving $100K to open source maintainers and asked for nominations. If Lerd has been useful to you, a reply under their post with github.com/lerd-env/lerd would help.
We have $100K to give away to open source maintainers! Let us know your suggestions and nominations.
