ForgeKit v1.8: The Completionist

The last three rows on the checklist

A while back, someone emailed a feature comparison they'd put together, lining ForgeKit up against the other Windows local-dev tools row by row: PHP versions, Node versions, multiple web servers, database engines, LAN access, you know the stuff. Well, there were 3 things on there that we were missing according to this person.

1. Mailpit

We added Mailpit inboxes. You can make multiple and tie them to a web server's PHP mail() with a click. Nothing wires itself up automatically, a web server can be moved between inboxes whenever you want, and inboxes respect the LAN preference the same way web servers already do. Each inbox also shows ready-to-copy SMTP connection info for apps that configure their own mail client instead of using PHP's built-in one, with Laravel and Symfony examples included.

A Mailpit inbox: start/stop/restart controls, an Open Inbox link, and both connection paths (PHP mail() and raw SMTP) in one place.

2.Redis and 3.Memcached

Cache Servers is the second new tab: add, start, stop, restart, and remove Redis and Memcached instances the same way you already manage web servers, databases, and mail servers. Redis gets its own redis.conf per instance, created once and never overwritten again, so you can open it from the instance's Config menu and turn persistence back on (or change anything else) without ForgeKit clobbering your edits on the next restart. Both engines show the same style of ready-to-copy connection info as everything else in the app:

REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PASSWORD=null
REDIS_PORT=6379

Redis and Memcached side by side. Redis 7.0.15 and 8.8.1 are offered out of the box. Memcached has 1.6.8. All installed and managed through the existing Manage Binaries flow.

Both new engines save their state through config.Mutate(), the single locked read-modify-save path that v1.7's reliability rewrite introduced for sites, instances, and preferences. Two brand-new instance types went in without needing a fourth or fifth way to touch ForgeKit.yaml, which is exactly the point of building that foundation in the first place: it's cheaper to add the next thing on top of it.

The person that put that comparison chart together, you know who you are, thank you. It was exactly the kick I needed to stop deferring these three.

The side quests

Alongside the headline features, a long list of smaller fixes shipped too.

Manage Binaries & toasts

The Manage Binaries list no longer flickers while an install or removal is running, and it no longer waits on a custom catalog to load before showing you the official one. Error messages and infos now have selectable text and a copy button.

Agent widget

The agent widget no longer flashes a false "port already in use" or "agent not running" warning during ordinary startup, shows a proper "Starting" state instead, and now tells you whether a port conflict is just a previous ForgeKit instance still shutting down (it resolves itself) or another app you'll need to close yourself.

Router landing page

The router landing page got a search box for once you have more than a handful of sites, a Mail Servers section listing every Mailpit inbox with an open-inbox link, and a fix for https://127.0.0.1/ failing with a TLS error (the auto-issued localhost certificate now includes IP address SANs, and existing installs repair themselves automatically).

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin's startup timeout was raised, since antivirus scanning php.exe for the first time on a fresh machine can take longer than the old 15 seconds allowed, and a stalled attempt now offers a Try Again button instead of a dead end.

PHP, nginx & the CLI

PHP got several defaults it should have had from the start: the gd extension turns on automatically when its DLL is present, memory_limit and max_execution_time were both raised for new sites, date.timezone now defaults to UTC, and both Apache and nginx sites finally get the same PHP defaults (nginx previously got none of them). New PHP binaries and phpMyAdmin's runtime also ship with a CA certificate bundle, fixing the classic "SSL certificate problem" on any outbound HTTPS call from PHP's cURL. On the CLI side, fkit npm/node/npx and friends now hand child processes a PATH prefixed with the site's own Node folder, so postinstall scripts that shell out to node by name can find it even on a machine with no Node installed globally.

Preferred Apps & the rest

Preferred Apps detection got noticeably wider: PowerShell 7, Command Prompt, WezTerm, Alacritty, and ConEmu/Cmder for terminals, PhpStorm, WebStorm, Zed, GVim, and Neovim Qt for editors. A manually picked .exe is recognized by filename too, so it still gets full support instead of a bare launch. Add Instance and Edit Label got a UI pass with color swatches, Add Instance now sends you straight to Manage Binaries when nothing's installed yet instead of showing a form you can't submit, and both the PHP version and Node version dropdowns show an installing item live instead of just leaving it out until it's done. The full list, including everything not mentioned here, is in the changelog.