Introduction

Vhostly is a macOS app that drives the Apache and PHP you installed with Homebrew. It writes virtual hosts, points local domains at your project folders or at a running dev server, issues locally-trusted certificates and switches PHP versions — without you opening a configuration file.

Nothing here is a new runtime. Vhostly edits the same files you would have edited by hand, in the places Homebrew put them, and restarts Apache afterwards. Delete the app and your sites keep serving, because what it left behind is ordinary Apache configuration.

What you need

  • macOS on Apple silicon. The app ships an arm64 server binary and reads Homebrew from /opt/homebrew. An Intel Mac is not supported today.
  • Homebrew. Everything else is installed and controlled through it.
  • Apache from Homebrew — brew install httpd. The httpd that ships with macOS lives somewhere else and is not what Vhostly manages.
  • PHP from Homebrew, if your sites need it. Proxy sites do not.
  • An administrator password, once. The first launch asks for it to grant the app ongoing access; after that it never asks again.

mkcert is optional but strongly recommended — it is what makes local HTTPS show a padlock instead of a warning. Turning on HTTPS for a site installs it for you.

Two kinds of site

A static site maps a domain to a folder on disk, and Apache serves it — PHP included. This is the classic virtual host.

A proxy site maps a domain to localhost:3000 and forwards everything, WebSocket upgrades included. Your Vite, Next.js or Rails dev server keeps running exactly as it does now, but reachable at https://myapp.test instead of a port number.

Both kinds live in the same list, take HTTPS the same way, and can be switched off and back on without losing their settings.

How the docs are organised

Getting Started takes you from a download to a site serving over HTTPS. Read it in order the first time.

Guides go one topic at a time — virtual hosts, proxy sites, PHP, certificates, ports, Apache, logs, backups. Each one explains what the app does on your behalf, so you can predict it.

Reference is for when something is off: every file Vhostly touches, what to check when a site will not resolve, and short answers to recurring questions.

A note on trust

Vhostly edits system files, takes ownership of a few of them, and installs a sudoers rule. That is the whole point of it, and it is also a good reason to know exactly what it does. What Vhostly writes lists every path and every change, and the source is on GitHub — readable precisely so you do not have to take any of this on faith.