Rig

Rig is an innovative Mac application designed to streamline and centralize local development workflows, acting as a comprehensive control plane for managing all processes within a project from a single, intuitive window. It addresses common pain points faced by developers by providing a unified interface to discover, start, stop, and monitor every local process, eliminating the need to juggle multiple terminal windows or commands.

At its core, Rig excels at process orchestration. It intelligently groups various types of development processes, including custom scripts, Procfiles, Laravel artisan sidecars, and even managed database instances like Postgres or Redis. This consolidation allows developers to view and manage their entire development environment holistically. A standout feature is its integrated log streaming, which aggregates logs from all managed processes into one feed, making debugging and monitoring significantly more efficient. Furthermore, Rig takes ownership of the ports bound by these processes, effectively replacing the manual and often cumbersome use of `lsof` to identify and resolve port conflicts.

A key differentiator for Rig is its robust integration with modern AI-powered development tools. It provides a local MCP (Machine Control Plane) hub, enabling popular AI assistants and IDEs such as Cursor, Claude, Codex, Windsurf, and VS Code to seamlessly interact with your local services. Through this hub, these tools can read the health status, access live logs, and identify bound ports, and even initiate restarts for crashed services without requiring direct shell access. This deep integration enhances developer productivity by allowing AI tools to proactively assist in maintaining a stable development environment.

Security and data privacy are paramount with Rig. The application is designed to keep all source code securely on the developer's local machine, ensuring that sensitive project data never leaves the disk. For teams or individuals working across multiple Macs, Rig offers an optional Cloud sync feature. This service intelligently synchronizes catalog metadata, Live Links, and encrypted Continuity backups, but crucially, it *never* syncs the actual code repository. This approach provides convenience without compromising code security.

Rig is explicitly positioned not as a hosted IDE, a cloud coding VM, or a PHP runtime. Instead, it complements existing development tools. For instance, while Laravel Herd and Valet continue to serve PHP applications, Rig works alongside them to manage other critical components like Vite for frontend builds, background queues, various APIs, and AI agents that are increasingly common in modern applications. This makes Rig an ideal companion for developers building complex, multi-service applications.

The Mac application is currently available for free in beta, supporting both Apple Silicon and Intel-based Macs running macOS 13 or later. This accessibility allows a broad range of developers to experience its benefits. By centralizing process management, simplifying logging, streamlining port handling, and offering intelligent AI integration, Rig aims to significantly enhance the local development experience, making it more organized, efficient, and less prone to common setup headaches.