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.

The window never shows up on Wayland

Some hybrid Intel and NVIDIA laptops crash under a Wayland session before the window appears, with failed to import supplied dmabufs on stderr. Running the app on X11 avoids it:

flatpak override --user --socket=x11 --env=ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=x11 sh.lerd.Desktop

flatpak override --user --reset sh.lerd.Desktop undoes it.

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.