Grove has grown a lot. It started as "serve *.test with HTTPS," and somewhere along the way it quietly became the whole workbench. So here's a friendly tour of things Grove already does for you — a few of which even regular users are surprised to learn. Grab a coffee; this is the good kind of list.
No self-signed warnings, no manual certs. Grove runs its own trusted local CA and issues a certificate per site on demand. grove secure myapp and you've got a green padlock on https://myapp.test.
Grove has a built-in DNS resolver for your TLD. Drop a project in a parked folder and it's instantly name.test — no hosts file, no dnsmasq.
grove park ~/Code turns every subdirectory into its own .test site. New project tomorrow? It's already served. Or grove link a single one.
grove php install 8.3 and grove isolate legacy-app 8.1 — each site gets its own PHP, no juggling. And they're bundled static builds, so no Homebrew.
grove node install 22, pin it per site with grove node use. No nvm, no fighting shell init files.
grove new myapp runs the official laravel new under the hood — pick a starter kit (Livewire, React, Vue, or a community one) and it's created, linked, and served, ready at https://myapp.test.
Toggle ⚡ on a site (or grove dev start myapp) and Grove supervises the Vite dev server and your queue worker — over trusted HTTPS, with the logs in the Logs panel. No more forgotten terminal tabs.
Grove runs a built-in mail-catcher. Point your app at it and read every message in the Mail panel — password resets, receipts, notifications — without a single real email leaving your machine.
Open the Database panel and your projects are just… there — Grove reads each site's .env and connects. Browse tables, run SELECTs, no connection details to type.
Double-click a cell to edit it, flip to the Schema tab to see columns, indexes, and foreign keys — and a production-safety guard flags prod-looking connections and blocks edits, so you can't fat-finger live data.
grove secret set myapp DB_PASSWORD=…, grove secret share myapp <teammate>, and they run grove secret pull --write. End-to-end encrypted — never pasted into Slack again.
Because Grove is the proxy, the Requests panel shows every request it handles — method, path, status, and duration — for any site, any framework. A zero-config peek at what your app is doing.
grove share myapp gives you a public URL — perfect for a webhook, a quick demo, or testing on your phone. Native, built in, no ngrok account.
The Tools panel migrates a MySQL database from Herd and converts databases between MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. The Logs panel parses your Laravel logs and Grove's own service logs into a tidy level/date/message view with a stacktrace pane — no tail -f.
💚 Did you know… all of that runs with zero external dependencies?
No Homebrew, no Docker, no dnsmasq, no OpenSSL, no Composer required to bootstrap. DNS, the reverse proxy, FastCGI, and TLS are built into a single Rust core; PHP, Node, and the databases are downloaded and supervised by Grove itself. Clean machine to a running *.test app with a padlock, in minutes.
If a few of these were news to you, you're not alone — Grove does a lot on your behalf, quietly. Now you know. 🌱🌳
Everything here except the Pro bits (data editing, schema inspector, team secret sync) is free and open source, forever. Try it at elyracode.com/grove.