Lerd Desktop

Your local PHP dev dashboard in a dedicated window, with native desktop notifications. No browser tab to hunt for, no permission prompts.

Lerd Desktop is the companion app for Lerd, the rootless, Podman-native local PHP development environment. It wraps the Lerd dashboard in a sandboxed native window and lets the Lerd daemon pop native desktop notifications — for captured mail, worker failures, and finished operations — so you can stop keeping a browser tab open just to catch them.

It's a thin shell by design: no dependency on Lerd's internals, it simply talks to the Lerd services already running on your machine.

Why a desktop app?

• A window of its own. The dashboard lives in a real app with its own icon, Alt-Tab entry, and taskbar slot, not lost among thirty browser tabs.
• Notifications without a browser. Native org.freedesktop.Notifications from the Lerd daemon, so alerts appear even with nothing open, and with no browser permission prompt to grant.
• Click straight to the thing. A click on a notification focuses the window and jumps to the captured email, the failing worker, or the finished service.
• Opens where you already are. lerd dashboard and the tray's Open Dashboard focus the running app through its lerd:// scheme instead of spawning yet another tab.

Features

• 🪟 Dedicated window around the live Lerd dashboard, loaded straight from the local UI, with a clean chrome-less frame
• 🔔 Native desktop notifications delivered by the Lerd daemon — mail, worker failures, finished operations — no browser, no permission prompt
• 🎯 Click-to-open: notifications and lerd:// deep links focus the window at the right route, launching it if it isn't already running
• 📦 Sandboxed Flatpak, rootless, heading to Flathub — installs into your user space with no system pollution
• 🐧 Wayland and X11, at home on GNOME, KDE, and Hyprland, with the correct app id so your compositor shows the Lerd icon
• 🪶 Zero coupling to Lerd's codebase — it reaches the dashboard over the local loopback and nothing more

Requirements

Lerd Desktop is a front-end for Lerd — install and start Lerd first:

curl -fsSL https://lerd.sh/install.sh | bash

Install

flatpak install --user https://lerd.sh/lerd.flatpakref

Then launch Lerd from your app menu, or run lerd dashboard — when the app is installed it opens there instead of the browser. Coming soon to Flathub.

How it works

The app points a native window at the Lerd UI on http://127.0.0.1:7073. Loading from the loopback origin means write actions pass Lerd's same-origin CSRF gate and the first-party dashboard is granted notification permission automatically. If Lerd isn't running yet, a gate screen polls until it comes online and offers to install it. External links open in your real browser; the window stays on the dashboard.

Build from source

Development run:

npm ci
npm start

Building the Flatpak locally (no root) is covered in flatpak/README.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.