Stop pasting your .env into Slack — meet Grove Teams
Grove Teams is the first local dev environment with end-to-end encrypted secret sync built in. Native, open source at the core, zero dependencies — and now your whole team's .env stays in sync, encrypted with age, without ever being pasted anywhere.
Let's just say it plainly: nobody else is doing this.
There are plenty of ways to run a Laravel app on your laptop. Valet is elegant but leans on Homebrew, dnsmasq, and a Mac. Herd ships tidy binaries but is closed, won't let you load a custom PHP extension, and puts databases, mail testing, and dumps behind a paywall. Docker and Sail are powerful but heavy — a fan-spinning tax on your battery for what should be a five-minute local setup.
Grove took a different bet: own the whole local environment, natively, with zero external dependencies, and keep the core open source. DNS, HTTPS, the reverse proxy, FastCGI, TLS — all built in. PHP, Node, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, a mail-catcher — all downloaded and supervised by Grove itself. No Homebrew. No dnsmasq. No Composer required to bootstrap. A clean machine to a running *.test Laravel app with a green padlock in minutes.
That alone makes Grove one of the best local dev environments for PHP — and the best if you care about being open, native, and dependency-free, especially for Laravel, where the whole stack (Vite over HTTPS, queues, per-site PHP versions, databases, mail) just works out of the box.
But here's the thing we're most proud of, and the part we genuinely believe we're alone in.
The problem everyone has, and nobody solved locally
Every team hits the same wall. Your app runs beautifully on your machine. Then a teammate clones the repo and… it doesn't. Wrong PHP. No database. And the .env — that carefully assembled file of API keys, database passwords, and service credentials — gets pasted into a Slack DM, or a shared 1Password note that's three values out of date, or a "hey can you send me your .env" message that makes every security-conscious bone in your body ache.
Local dev tools have always stopped at the edge of your own machine. The moment collaboration enters, you're on your own. Grove Teams is the first local dev environment to cross that line.
Grove Teams: your .env, shared securely
With Grove Teams, a project's secrets are encrypted on your machine and shared with your teammates — end-to-end, so they're never pasted anywhere.
$ grove secret set myapp DB_PASSWORD=super-secret
✓ set DB_PASSWORD in myapp
$ grove secret share myapp age1teammatekey…
✓ granted access to myapp
Your teammate, after cloning the repo:
$ grove secret pull myapp --write
✓ wrote .env
That's it. The .env is on their machine, decrypted with their own private key, and the app runs. When someone leaves the team, one command re-encrypts without them and they're locked out on the spot.
And the security model is the real flex: secrets are encrypted with age (X25519) to each current member's public key. The hosted backend only ever stores ciphertext — it literally cannot read your secrets. Licenses are verified offline, and the seat count is enforced server-side. It's the encryption model behind tools like age and sops, wired directly into the environment that already runs your app. No separate secrets manager to bolt on. No copy-paste. No trust required in the server.
Why this is genuinely unique
Take a step back and look at the combination:
Native and dependency-free — not Docker, not Homebrew, not a VM.
Open source at the core — inspectable, no license wall on the essentials (unlike the closed alternative that gates databases and dumps).
The full stack, bundled — multi-version PHP, Node, databases, mail, tunnels, trusted HTTPS, a request timeline, database snapshots.
And now, team infrastructure — E2E encrypted secret sync, built into the same tool.
No one else has all of that in one place. Valet is solo and Mac-and-Homebrew-bound. Herd is closed and solo. Docker doesn't do any of the DX and certainly doesn't sync your team's secrets. Dedicated secrets managers don't know anything about your local PHP environment. Grove is the only tool sitting at the intersection — a local dev environment that is native, open, complete, and team-aware.
Especially for Laravel
If you build Laravel apps, this fits like it was made for you — because it was. Per-site PHP isolation, Vite served over trusted HTTPS with zero config, queue workers supervised for you, bundled MySQL/Postgres/Redis with one-command snapshots before a scary migration, a mail-catcher for every outgoing email, and now grove.toml + grove up so a teammate goes from git clone to a running app in one command — with their secrets already in place.
The daily rituals of Laravel local dev — the ones you've quietly tolerated for years — Grove just handles. And the team rituals that no tool ever handled, Grove Teams now does too.
Come see for yourself
The core is free and open source, forever. Grove Teams is $99 per seat, per year — cheaper than the sum of the tools it replaces, and the only one that keeps your team's local environment in sync securely.
$ grove secret pull myapp --write
Try Grove at elyracode.com/grove. We think it's the best way to do local PHP and Laravel development, full stop — and with Grove Teams, the first one that was built for more than one person. 🌱🌳
We don't say "nobody else does this" lightly. If you find a tool that does — native, open, full-stack local dev with end-to-end encrypted team secret sync — we'd genuinely love to see it. We looked. We couldn't find one. So we built it.