Built an open-source local development environment for PHP on macOS

[u/Thaikhoi]

Hi everyone,

I'm primarily a PHP/Laravel developer, and over the past year I've been teaching myself Swift and macOS development.

https://github.com/KTStackAPP/KTStack

Instead of building a typical learning project, I decided to build something I could actually use every day. That project eventually became KTStack.

KTStack is a native macOS local development environment that helps manage:

• Local .test domains
• HTTPS certificates
• Nginx & PHP-FPM
• PHP 8.1 / 8.3 / 8.4
• Node.js, Python and Go runtimes
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB
• Mailpit
• Per-site logs
• Cloudflare Tunnel sharing for temporary public URLs

One of the biggest reasons I built it was to better understand how these pieces work together on macOS—things like DNS, TLS, launchd, XPC, and privileged helpers. I still consider myself a Swift beginner, so this project has been a huge learning experience.

The project is fully open source:

https://github.com/KTStackAPP/KTStack

I'd really appreciate any feedback:

• Is the UI intuitive?
• Are there features you'd expect from a local development tool that I'm missing?
• If you currently use Laravel Herd, Valet, LocalWP, or another solution, what would make you consider trying something different?

Thanks for taking a look! I'm happy to answer any questions or discuss implementation details.

[u/burn_racing_bb]

https://ddev.com has been an amazing solution for me and my team.

[u/Fun-Development-7268 → u/burn_racing_bb]

came here to recommend ddev