Five Months of Building an Open Source PHP Dev Tool: What Grew, What Failed, and What Surprised Me
In May 2026, I published an article here about lerd, a local PHP development environment I built for Linux because Laravel Herd does not support Linux and I got tired of the alternatives. At the time, I had a handful of stars and was not sure anyone would care.
Five months later, Lerd has 780+ GitHub stars, 16 external contributors, users in 40+ countries, a community of developers in Brazil who adopted it and started contributing, and a release cadence that has shipped 30 versions. I want to write about what actually happened, what worked, what completely failed, and what I did not see coming.
What I built and why
The original problem has not changed. Laravel Herd is the best local PHP dev environment available, and it runs only on macOS and Windows. Herd's own website says there are currently no plans for a Linux version. DDEV and Lando...
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