Forjed Releases Yerd v2: A Free, Rootless, Open-Source Local PHP Environment Manager

UNITED KINGDOM — 6 July 2026 — Forjed, the independent UK software studio, today announced the release of Yerd v2, a free, open-source, and fully rootless local PHP development environment for macOS and Linux. Yerd gives PHP and Laravel developers the experience they expect from a modern local setup, with projects served instantly on .test domains, trusted HTTPS, and the right PHP version per site, all delivered as lightweight native processes rather than containers or a bundled browser.

Yerd v2 is not an incremental update. It is a complete, ground-up rewrite of the original Go-based project in Rust, redesigned around a single small background daemon that owns everything: sites, PHP versions, HTTPS, DNS, databases, and mail. Developers can drive that daemon two ways, through a native desktop tray app or a first-class, fully scriptable yerd command line interface, with both acting as clients of the same daemon, so they can never disagree about what is running.

The result is a tool that installs small and fast, stays out of the way, and behaves consistently across operating systems. There is no compiler to wait on, no virtual machine, and no password prompt every time a developer touches a site.

What's new in Yerd v2

• A single ~8 MB Rust daemon. No containers, no VM, no Electron, just native processes supervised for you.

• Rootless by design. Setup elevates exactly once; after that, the daemon, CLI, and desktop app all run as your own user, never as root.

• Prebuilt PHP, downloaded on demand. Signed static builds install in seconds, so there is no need to compile PHP from source.

• Zero-config .test sites with automatic HTTPS. Park a folder and every project inside it is instantly live; a local certificate authority issues a trusted certificate per site on demand, giving you a green padlock with no mkcert dance and no browser warnings.

• Any PHP version, per site. Install as many versions as you need and pin each project to the one it requires, with a global default as the fallback.

• Batteries included. MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Redis supervised as native processes; built-in SMTP mail capture; live Laravel dump streaming; managed Composer, Node, and Bun; and one-click public sharing over Cloudflare Tunnel.

• Self-diagnosing. yerd status shows what's running and yerd doctor explains exactly what's broken and how to fix it, repairing the safe problems automatically.

Yerd v2 runs on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu and Arch) today, with Windows on the roadmap. Because v2 is a clean rewrite with a new on-disk layout and command set, it is a replacement rather than an in-place upgrade; a step-by-step migration guide for existing v1 users is available in the documentation.

Positioned as an open-source alternative to commercial tools such as Laravel Herd, Yerd is released under the permissive MIT License, free to use, read, audit, and contribute to.

We built Yerd for both an internal tool, and for the wider PHP community, mainly out of a shared frustration that there simply wasn't a truly open-source, cross-platform environment for local development that didn't drag in heavy overheads like Docker or Electron, or hide the good parts behind a yearly subscription. It's enormously satisfying to finally retire those subscriptions to closed-source tooling and reach for a single, free, open tool that does the whole job.

— Richard Anderson, co-founder of Forjed

Yerd is something the whole team reaches for every single day. Getting to put it into the hands of other developers, completely free and fully open, is one of the most rewarding things we've done at Forjed.

— Guy Whammond, co-founder of Forjed

The Yerd v2 release reflects a broader commitment at Forjed to the open-source tools its own engineers depend on. Alongside Yerd, Forjed is proud to support other open-source projects close to the team's heart, including VitoDeploy (vitodeploy.com), a free, self-hosted server management and deployment tool for PHP applications, and Muxy (muxy.app), a lightweight, memory-efficient terminal multiplexer for Mac. Forjed's aim is to help ensure the tools developers rely on stay actively maintained rather than quietly abandoned.

Yerd v2 is available now, free of charge and under the MIT License. Downloads for macOS and Linux, full documentation, and the complete source are available at yerd.app and on GitHub at github.com/forjedio/yerd.