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A solo developer shares a five-month retrospective on building lerd, an open source local PHP development environment for Linux (and now macOS) that uses rootless Podman containers instead of Docker Desktop. The project grew from 0 to 780+ GitHub stars, attracted 16 external contributors, and users in 40+ countries. Key features added include a debug window intercepting dumps and SQL queries, an MCP server compatible with major AI coding tools, Git worktree isolation with per-branch databases, a framework store using versioned YAML, and idle-suspend for battery savings. The post covers what worked in promotion (targeted community posts, direct outreach to influencers, fast issue response), what failed (Hacker News, X without an audience), and unexpected outcomes like a strong Brazilian contributor community and a community-maintained NixOS flake.

Five Months of Building an Open Source PHP Dev Tool: What Grew, What Failed, and What Surprised Me

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This is fcking awesome. Would be great if laravel would offical support this.

Lerd is awesome, i am using it for a month or two now, and no, on linux, this is awesome

once i hammers podman into shape lol , oh boy, i had issues with podman , cause docker ( docker rootless ) was working fine, but podman , don’t get me started lol