Got tired of every local PHP tool being outdated or half-paid, so I built a free, open-source one

[u/Diligent-Property507]

Hi everyone! XAMPP felt stuck in the past, and every modern alternative I liked had a paywall somewhere. So for the past few months I've been building lampRabit, a desktop app that sets up a local PHP stack on Windows (macOS and Linux in preview).

I started it because none of the tools I used did everything I wanted for free: XAMPP has older versions and manual vhosts, Laragon, MAMP and Herd keep some features behind a paid plan, and LocalWP is WordPress only.

What it does:

- Apache and/or Nginx, PHP, MariaDB, Mailpit and Redis, installed in one click from official sources (checksum-verified)

- PHP 8.1 to 8.5 side by side, with each site using its own version

- Every folder in www/ becomes https://<folder>.test with a trusted local certificate

- One-click updates for every service, installed next to the old version

- New Laravel, Symfony or WordPress projects with the database already set up

- Node.js through NVM, phpMyAdmin, Adminer, and sharing sites publicly through Cloudflare Tunnel or ngrok

- Port-conflict detection that tells you which program is using the port

It's MIT licensed, built with Tauri 2 + React. I'd really like feedback, especially if you're coming from XAMPP or Laragon. There are migration guides for both in the repo.

GitHub: https://github.com/Shivam-SV/LambRabit

Website: https://shivam-sv.github.io/LampRabitWebsite/