DDEV Control Panel

A macOS menu bar app that lists the ddev projects on your machine and runs lifecycle commands against them. No dock icon and no main window: the menu bar item is the only entry point.

Built with NativePHP (Laravel, Livewire and Electron).

What it does

• Lists every project ddev list knows about, with its status and primary URL.
• Start, stop, restart and delete a project from its row.
• ddev poweroff for everything at once.
• Search, for when the list runs to dozens of projects.
• Keeps up on its own: start or stop a project in a terminal and the list follows within seconds, whether the popup is open or not.

Status text mirrors ddev list exactly, including the running to OK substitution and the mutagen suffix. Colour deliberately differs: ddev prints stopped in red, which reads as "everything is broken" once you have a few dozen projects, so stopped is neutral here and red is reserved for states that actually need attention.

Deleting a project never passes --omit-snapshot, so a mis-click stays recoverable with ddev snapshot restore.

Requirements

• macOS
• ddev on the machine (Homebrew or the install script; the path is auto-detected)
• PHP 8.3 or newer, Composer, and Node 22 for development

Development

This project drives ddev, it is not itself a ddev project, so everything runs against the host toolchain. Electron needs a GUI and the macOS binaries the app shells out to.

Node 22 is required and pinned in .nvmrc. Node 24 silently truncates the zip extractions NativePHP depends on, and every symptom of that looks like an unrelated bug.

nvm use
composer install
npm install
cp .env.example .env && php artisan key:generate

npm run dev              # separate terminal, for Vite
php artisan native:run   # needs a TTY

PHP changes need native:run restarted. Only JS and CSS hot-reload through Vite.

Tests:

php artisan test

Why everything slow goes through the queue

ddev list inspects every project's containers and takes seconds on a machine with many projects. NativePHP serves the app with a single-worker php -S, so any blocking call freezes the whole popup. No ddev command ever runs inside a request: jobs write a snapshot to the cache, and the Livewire component only ever reads it.

How it notices changes made outside the app

ddev has nothing to subscribe to: it is a one shot CLI, and its hooks live in each project's .ddev/config.yaml rather than globally. Docker does have an event stream, and ddev labels every container it creates, so php artisan ddev:watch follows docker events --filter label=com.ddev.platform=ddev and asks for a new snapshot once the events settle. It runs as a supervised child process for the life of the app, and costs nothing while Docker has nothing to report.

Set DDEV_WATCH_ENABLED=false to turn it off and go back to refreshing only when the popup is opened.

Icons

php resources/icons/build-icons.php    # then restart native:run

public/ is the source of truth. resources/icons/app-icon.png produces public/icon.png, and resources/icons/ddev-mark.svg produces the menu bar template images.

Building a release

export GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token)
php artisan native:build mac arm64 --publish

Releases are created as drafts on GitHub and have to be published by hand.

License

MIT.