Game changer
EnvKit has genuinely transformed how I do local PHP development — it's the most intuitive and powerful local dev stack I've used, and it lets you ditch clunky Node.js tooling or heavyweight IDEs entirely.
Each project gets its own fully isolated environment: you can register any CLI command as a tool or set up cron jobs in a single interface, and they all run alongside your project. Deployment from ZIP archives takes just a few clicks, and you can install multiple versions of PHP, Go, MariaDB, and other services that run in parallel — so every project spins up on exactly the stack it needs, natively, without Docker or something! From there, it's one click to open your configured domain or project folder in your favorite editor, manage environment variables, or fire up a terminal that behaves like a real server. Git branch switching, commits, and full log viewing are all built in.
It's a paradise for PHP developers, though it handles Node projects just as well. What really sets it apart is the community: the maintainers respond to bug reports and feature requests almost instantly. File an issue on GitHub, and you might have that feature in a new release within two hours — it genuinely makes you feel like part of the project.
2 September 2026
Unprompted review