Rigly Rigly Beta

Installation

Rigly comes as a disk image signed and notarized by Apple. Installing takes a minute or two, most of it downloading PHP.

Install the app

  1. Download Rigly.
  2. Open Rigly.dmg and drag Rigly to Applications.
  3. Open Rigly from Applications, Launchpad or Spotlight.

Rigly lives in your menu bar. The first time you open it, its window shows a welcome screen.

First-time setup

Click Install. Rigly then:

  1. Asks for your password, once. macOS shows an "Install Helper" prompt. Rigly installs a small helper that sets up the system parts:
    • a resolver file, so macOS asks Rigly about .test addresses;
    • forwarding of ports 80 and 443 to Rigly's web server, so sites work without port numbers. The helper is what lets Rigly change these later, from Settings, without asking again.
  2. Downloads Caddy and PHP 8.4 (about 80 MB) into ~/Library/Application Support/Rigly, and adds Rigly's commands to your PATH.
  3. Starts its background service, and waits until everything is up before showing the main window.

If you click Don't Allow, nothing is changed and you're back at the Install button.

Rigly also installs some developer tools in the background: Composer, Node (the current LTS, through nvm) and the Laravel installer.

Your domain: .test or .rig

Rigly normally serves sites at .test on 127.0.0.1, like most PHP tools.

If you already have something serving local sites, Rigly uses .rig on 127.0.0.2 instead, so the two run side by side without clashing. The welcome screen tells you when this happens. Rigly does this when it finds:

  • Laravel Herd or Laravel Valet;
  • a web server already running on port 80 or 443 (MAMP, Homebrew nginx or Apache, Docker…);
  • another tool already handling .test (an /etc/resolver/test file).

The choice is made once, on first install, and kept. Throughout these docs, .test means whichever domain your Rigly uses. To choose your own from the command line, see rigly setup.

The rigly command in Terminal

Setup also puts Rigly's commands on your PATH, so you can use them in Terminal: rigly, and the php, composer, node, npm and other commands that use each site's versions. Rigly adds one line to your shell's startup file: ~/.zshrc for zsh (macOS's default), ~/.bash_profile for bash, or ~/.config/fish/conf.d/rigly.fish for fish.

Open a new Terminal window after installing, then check it works:

rigly status

If you'd rather add it yourself, Settings shows the line to use.

Start at login

Rigly's background service keeps running when you quit the app, and starts again when you log in. To have the menu bar icon come back at login too, turn on Open Rigly at login in Settings. When Rigly starts at login it stays in the menu bar; opening it from Applications shows its window.

Check everything is working

Settings shows a list of checks: the background service, the web server, DNS, the resolver, port forwarding and HTTPS. If any need attention, click Fix. From the command line:

rigly doctor