Lerd for PhpStorm

Your Lerd site, inside the IDE you already have open. Its logs, its PHP version, its workers, its services, its queries and everything it dumped, without a browser tab.

The project you open resolves to exactly one Lerd site, and everything the dashboard offers for that site comes with it. The plugin talks to nothing but the Lerd already running on your machine, and gets out of the way entirely for a project Lerd does not know.

Features

Always visible

• 🔴 Quiet until it matters. A status bar widget carries the site's domain and PHP version, greys out when Lerd is stopped, and is not drawn at all for a project that is not a Lerd site — so the plugin costs nothing while you work on something else.

• 🖱️ The six verbs worth reaching for. Click the widget: open in browser, restart, HTTPS on or off, pause, switch PHP version, open the dashboard.

• 🔌 No polling. State arrives over the dashboard's own websocket, so stopping Lerd in a terminal greys the widget out within a second.

Site

• 🧭 The overview, in three columns. Domain, framework, branch and path; the PHP and Node version pickers; a toggle per worker; a row per service. The columns reflow to two and then one as the tool window narrows, so it reads the same docked to the side as along the bottom.

• 🗄️ Open in Database. Opens the service in the IDE's own Database tool window, lands on this site's database rather than the server node, and fills in the password Lerd already knows. It reuses the connection Lerd wrote into .idea/dataSources.xml instead of adding a second one beside it.

• 🐚 Shells where you want them. A shell inside the site's container, or a client shell into a service through the binaries Lerd ships: mysql, psql, redis-cli, mongosh.

• 🩺 Site doctor. Lerd's own findings for the site, and nothing when every check passes.

Logs

• 🧯 A framework log is a list of problems, not a wall. The same failure two hundred times is one row with a count, a first-seen and a last-seen, and the full record beside it. Ids and quoted values are collapsed, so one error does not split into two hundred.

• 📡 Everything else is a live tail. PHP-FPM or FrankenPHP, every worker, every service the site uses, and nginx, resumed from where it left off when a connection drops.

• 🔗 A path in a stack trace is a link. Both panes are IDE consoles, so an exception in the queue worker is one click from the line that threw it. This is the whole reason for doing any of it inside the IDE rather than beside it.

N+1 & Slow

• 🐌 The queries worth fixing, worst first. Repeats inside a single request and anything over the slow threshold, read from real captured traffic rather than from the code.

• ▶️ Runnable. Double-click a finding and the statement opens as a .sql scratch against the site's database, one keystroke from executing.

Dumps

• 🔍 Every lens the dashboard has. Dumps, queries, jobs, views, mail, cache, events, HTTP, logs, exceptions and messages, each a tab with its count, and only drawn when it has something in it.

• 🧵 A trace you can read. The first frame outside vendor/ is pulled to the top as where it came from, every frame is linked, and vendor frames recede instead of burying the two that matter.

• 🧪 Test runs stay out of the way. Captured and tagged rather than dropped, so a dump added to diagnose a failing test is one toggle away.

The IDE's own settings, kept honest

• 🐘 PHP follows the site. The language level, the CLI interpreter (pointed at Lerd's php shim) and the PHP server entry for Xdebug all track whatever Lerd actually serves the site with. One direction on purpose: Lerd owns what runs the site, and a language level changed in the IDE is an inspection setting, not a reason to rebuild a container.

• 🌳 Worktrees are first class. Open a git worktree as its own project and it resolves to its parent site plus the branch, with its own units and logs.

Requirements

PhpStorm 2025.2 or newer, and Lerd running on the same machine. No account, no token, no daemon of its own.

Install

In PhpStorm, Settings > Plugins > Marketplace, search for Lerd, install, restart. Or from the listing directly:

plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/34420-lerd

To run a build of your own instead:

./install-local.sh

That drops the plugin into the newest ~/.local/share/JetBrains/PhpStorm* directory it finds; set LERD_PLUGINS_DIR to aim it elsewhere. PhpStorm loads it on restart, and removing the lerd-phpstorm folder uninstalls it.

Privacy and permissions

Everything happens over loopback to the Lerd already running as your user, on 127.0.0.1:7073 — the same API the dashboard in your browser uses, which is why neither needs credentials. Nothing is sent anywhere else and there is no telemetry. Every change it makes is a request to Lerd's own API, and a command a framework definition marks as destructive asks first.

When Lerd is stopped the plugin reads ~/.local/share/lerd/sites.yaml so it can still tell you that this project is a Lerd site and that Lerd is not running.

Development

./gradlew test          # unit tests
./gradlew runIde        # a sandbox PhpStorm with the plugin loaded
./gradlew verifyPlugin  # the JetBrains plugin verifier, 2025.2 through 2026.3

Needs a JDK 21 or newer; the IDE it compiles against is downloaded by the build, so nothing touches your installed PhpStorm.

The parts that decide anything are plain Kotlin with no IDE dependency and are covered by tests: api/ speaks to the daemon, site/ maps the open project onto a site, logs/ groups and renders what comes back, db/ turns a connection URL into something the Database tools can open. toolwindow/ and widget/ only draw.

Licence

MIT.