Hey [r/webdev](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/),

About 18 months ago I shipped v1 of a local dev tool called Yerd, a Go-based CLI for macOS and Linux. It was rough. It was opinionated, it demanded sudo for basically everything, and it fought you about as often as it helped.

It came out of a frustration I suspect isn't unique to me: local dev environments tend to be either heavyweight or invasive. The heavyweight option (Docker, VMs) drains your battery, chews through RAM, and buries you in YAML. The invasive option (a lot of native tools) run as root, edits your /etc/hosts, and scatters global installs across your machine that you'll be untangling months later, or worst of all, have a yearly subscription!

I wanted a third option, so I've spent the last 18 months building (and rebuilding...) one. This week I shipping the first stable v2, rebuilt from the ground up in Rust, and I wanted to share how it actually works because the design is the interesting part.

The whole thing is a single \~8MB daemon. It supervises everything: web serving, the language runtimes, databases, Redis, and a local mail catcher. A tiny tray app (Tauri, not Electron) and a CLI that talks to it.

The bits I'm most pleased with:

* **Rootless day-to-day by design.** Setup elevates exactly once, to bind ports 80/443 and trust a local certificate authority. After that, nothing ever runs as root again. No more sudo-per-action like v1.
* **Embedded DNS.** It resolves .test domains itself, so there's no /etc/hosts editing and no dnsmasq to babysit - the resolver sits in the daemon itself.
* **A local certificate authority.** It issues per-site HTTPS certs on demand, so every local site gets a real green padlock with no mkcert step.
* **Native, not containerised.** Drop a project into a parked folder and it's instantly live at project.test. Full filesystem speed, instant startup, no compose file.
* **Runtime versions side by side.** Multiple language versions installed at once, pinned per project.

It's open source (MIT) and subscription-free:

* [https://yerd.app](https://yerd.app/)
* [https://github.com/forjedio/yerd](https://github.com/forjedio/yerd)

It happens to be built for PHP right now (there's some nice framework-level telemetry for Laravel devs), but plans are to add support for other languages in the future. Windows support is expected in the next couple months as well.

We actually just shipped v2.0.3 today, which includes first-class support for WordPress sites (creation wizard and one-click-login to WPA without plugins), and also introduce proxies for serving third party services or docker instances through .test domains. 

I'll be around in the comments to answer any questions.

Yerd v2 - Local PHP development tool for MacOS and Linux