Most of us live in two worlds at once. Some projects run natively β a Laravel app served straight off the filesystem, fast and easy to step through. Others live in Docker β a tidy docker compose up with nginx, a database, a queue worker, maybe ClickHouse. Both are great. What's not great is the seam between them.
Your native sites answer at myapp.test with a trusted green padlock. Your containers answer at something like something.orb.local, or a raw localhost:8000, or a port you can never quite remember. Two naming schemes, two ways to get HTTPS, two places to look. It's a small tax, but you pay it every day.
Grove 0.4 removes the seam. It becomes one front door for both worlds β native sites and Docker/OrbStack containers, under the same *.test names, the same trusted local HTTPS, and the same dashboard.
Grove already knew how to be a good local host: DNS for *.test, a reverse proxy, TLS terminated with its own trusted CA, a dashboard. Containers were the one thing standing outside that. So we taught Grove to bring them in.
The idea: any running container becomes a first-class <name>.test site. Grove terminates TLS with its trusted cert and reverse-proxies to the container. No per-container certificate dance, no remembering ports, no context-switching. And because a container is now just another Grove site, everything else Grove does comes along for free β including public tunnels.
There's no new command to learn. Start your containers as you always do:
$ docker compose up -d
Grove notices. Within a few seconds it discovers the web container and starts serving it:
$ grove list
SITE DRIVER PHP HTTPS URL
elyra-web.test laravel 8.4 yes https://elyra-web.test
inside2.test proxy yes https://inside2.test π³
There's your dockerized app, inside2.test, sitting right next to a native Laravel site β with a trusted certificate:
$ curl -sI https://inside2.test | head -1
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Grove finds the right container in one of two ways:
A label you (or OrbStack) already set. If a container carries dev.orbstack.domains or an explicit grove.host, Grove reuses it:
$ docker ps --format '{{.Names}}\t{{.Labels}}' | grep orbstack
inside2-nginx ...,dev.orbstack.domains=inside2.local,...
Grove reads that label, serves inside2.test, and quietly ignores the database, cache and queue containers β you don't want mysql.test.
No labels at all. Just a plain docker compose project. Grove picks the web container by service name and published port and serves <project>.test. Nothing to configure.
In the daemon log it's a single, calm line:
INFO docker sites updated containers=1
Stop a container and the site slips away; start it and it comes back. It's live.
Because containers are real sites now, they live in the same Sites table β with a π³ badge and their own controls:
π₯ Sites
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
β HOST DRIVER HTTPS ACTIONS β
β elyra-web.test laravel π’ β π π π β
β inside2.test π³ docker π β π β» βΉ β
β π³ http://inside2.local β
β legacy-api.test π³ docker π βΆ (stopped) β
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
Restart (β») and stop (βΉ) a running container, or start (βΆ) a stopped one β without leaving the dashboard. A stopped site even serves a friendly little "start it from the Sites list" page instead of a cryptic connection error.
And that π button? Yes β you can tunnel a container publicly too:
$ grove share inside2
πΏ Tunnel online
Public https://7f3a2c9k.grove.elyracode.com
Local http://inside2.test
A dockerized app, shared to the internet over HTTPS, in one command. That's the payoff of treating containers as first-class sites: features you built for native apps just work.
The first thing I tried was the obvious one: proxy inside2.test to the container's published host port, 127.0.0.1:8000.
$ curl -sI http://127.0.0.1:8000
(hangs, then nothing)
Dead end. The nginx inside listens on 8080 for server_name inside2.local; the published 8000 was a decoy. The app was reachable at the container's IP on 8080, and β crucially β at inside2.local through OrbStack's own routing:
$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' http://inside2.local
200
So Grove reuses that: for OrbStack-labelled containers it proxies to the container's own domain and lets OrbStack handle the internal port heuristics. Grove adds the .test name, the trusted certificate, the dashboard and the tunnels; OrbStack keeps doing the part it's already great at. Standing on shoulders, not toes.
There was also a delightfully sneaky bug: talking to the Docker socket with a plain HTTP request, the Engine kept the connection open, so our "read the response" step waited⦠forever. The fix was a one-liner (Connection: close) plus a hard timeout, so container discovery can never, ever hang the daemon.
Grove auto-updates. After it relaunches:
# pick up the new daemon (one click in Tools β Restart daemon)
$ grove status | head -1
Grove 0.4.1
Then just⦠start your containers. They show up.
Two worlds, one front door. Native sites and Docker containers, the same names, the same trusted HTTPS, the same dashboard, the same one-command public sharing. The seam is gone β and honestly, that's the nicest kind of feature: the one you stop noticing, because everything is finally in the same place. π³π³