What is a local process control plane?

A local process control plane is software that sits on your machine and runs the stack you already have: scripts, Procfiles, artisan sidecars, databases, and the ports they steal. Rig is that plane for Mac. It is not a cloud IDE, not a container host, and not a PHP runtime.

If your morning is six terminal tabs, you already have a control plane. It is just made of muscle memory. One tab is npm run dev and you cannot remember the port. One is a queue that died an hour ago. One is lsof again. Rig is the board those tabs were trying to be.

What it actually does

Rig discovers the processes behind a project folder, starts them in order, health-checks them, and streams the logs into one place. When something dies, you restart that process — not the whole machine. When a port is taken, you see who owns it. When Cursor or Claude needs to know what is running, they ask the local MCP hub instead of guessing from a paste.

The Mac app works offline. Optional cloud syncs catalog metadata and encrypted Continuity backups. Source code stays on disk. That is the whole product bet, written down: sync the setup, never the source.

What it is not

• Not Laravel Herd or Valet. Those serve PHP. Rig sits beside them when you also run Vite, a queue, and an API.
• Not Docker Desktop. Containers still belong to Docker. Rig will start a compose script; it will not replace the runtime.
• Not Local by WP Engine. Local is a deep WordPress studio. Rig will one-click a WP site and still run the rest of your day.
• Not a hosted coding VM. If you want the repo in the cloud, that is a different product and a different threat model.

Who it is for

Solo developers and small teams who run more than one process, often on more than one Mac, often with an AI editor in the loop. Freelancers who share a preview without spinning staging. Agencies who are tired of "which tab was the queue."

If you only ever run php artisan serve and you are happy, you do not need Rig yet. That is fine.

Where to go next

Read What is Rig?, then your first 10 minutes. If you already live in Herd or Valet, the honest comparison is Rig vs Laravel Herd.

https://userig.app/blog/what-is-a-local-process-control-plane