Point it at the folder, the cat does the rest — a local dev environment that reads your project

Here is the demo I show everyone: clone a Laravel + Vite repository, drag the folder into DevCatz, press Start. A few seconds later the app is on https://app.localhost — the right PHP, Node for Vite, the database from .env, the queue worker and the scheduler running. I did not write a single line of configuration.

That is the whole idea of DevCatz: instead of a panel of services you wire up yourself, it reads the project and works out what it needs.

What "reads the project" means
When you add a folder, DevCatz tries one language after another — PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Node.js / Bun, Go — and the first match wins. Then it looks for the framework:

PHP: Laravel, Symfony, WordPress / Bedrock, CodeIgniter, Yii, CakePHP, Drupal, Joomla, Slim, plain PHP
Python: Django, FastAPI, Flask, Litestar, Starlette, Sanic and more — in the project's own virtualenv
Ruby: Rails, Hanami, Sinatra, Roda, Jekyll, Bridgetown and more, with bundle check before every start
Node.js / Bun: Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, SvelteKit, NestJS, Vite apps, Express, Hono and more
Go and Rust: Gin, Echo, Fiber, Goravel, Axum, Actix, Leptos and more
No framework at all: a file that listens is enough, in Go, Rust, JS, Python or Ruby, and a folder of plain HTML just gets served
Monorepos work too: every app inside is found and gets its own name, so an API and its frontend sit side by side.

From that it knows the dev command, the port, which runtime version to install, where the migrations are and which tasks belong in the site's menu (migrate, db:seed, collectstatic, rails test…).

HTTPS without thinking about it
Every site gets its own https://.localhost. DevCatz makes a local certificate authority on your computer and asks once to trust it, so the browser shows a padlock instead of a warning. .localhost needs no DNS changes at all; if you prefer your own ending (like .test), DevCatz sets that up too.

Everything a site needs, in the same window
Runtimes — PHP, Node.js, Bun, Python, Ruby, Go and Rust, any version per site, installed for you
Databases — MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Valkey, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, side by side in any version
Storage, search and WebSockets — S3-compatible storage, Meilisearch, Typesense, Reverb and others
A mail catcher — every email your app sends lands in a local inbox, OTP codes included
Tunnels — put a site on a public URL with a QR code for your phone, and replay a webhook after a code change
Per site — logs, .env editing, the database link, Git, and Docker files generated from the stack
Each site's database opens in DBCatz with one click, already connected, and each site becomes an environment in DialCatz with its routes as requests. Here is the whole family working together, in two and a half minutes:

AI, if you want it
Explain with AI reads an error in a site's logs and says what happened and how to fix it. Ask DevCatz turns a plain request ("start the shop and its database") into steps you run one by one. It is all off until you add your own key, and every feature shows exactly what would be sent first.

On macOS, Windows and Linux
Version 1.2.1 just added Linux (x64 and ARM64, AppImage or .deb) to the Mac and Windows builds. On Linux the certificate goes into the system store and into Chrome and Firefox, clean URLs use systemd, and secrets live in your desktop keyring. The Mac builds are signed and notarized; the Windows and Linux packages are not signed yet.

Try it
Download: catzoid.com/devcatz/download
Homebrew too:

brew tap catzoidhub/catz && brew trust catzoidhub/catz && brew install --cask devcatz

Docs: catzoid.com/docs/devcatz
Source (GPL-3.0): github.com/catzoidhub/DevCatz
DevCatz is made in Indonesia by one person, with two others helping, and written with Claude. If it does not recognise your project, or gets something wrong, please open an issue — that is how the cat learns new tricks. And if it saved you an afternoon, a star helps others find it.