Guides

These guides cover day-to-day operations once PortBay is installed.

Guide	Use it when
Networking & DNS	A hostname won't resolve, dnsmasq or the hosts helper needs explaining, or you're diagnosing DNS under a VPN.
Certificates	The local CA, per-project HTTPS, or a custom certificate needs explaining or troubleshooting.
Domains	You want per-project routing knobs — path prefix, resolver mode, wildcard subdomains, expose-when-running.
Caddy and HTTPS	A hostname does not route, certificates fail, or Caddy is out of sync.
PHP Setup	A Laravel, WordPress, or plain PHP project needs PHP-FPM.
Custom Domain Suffix	You want hostnames under a suffix other than .test.
Services	You want to see or control every bundled sidecar (Process Compose, Caddy, dnsmasq, Mailpit, …) in one place.
Integrations	You want to curate your sidebar, launch a local editor/terminal, or connect an external tool (GitHub, Linear, Sentry, …).
Environment Variables	A project needs runtime variables or shared templates.
Project Groups	Multiple projects should start, stop, or restart together.
SSH Tunnels	You need to forward a remote database, VPS/cPanel host, cloud VM, bastion-only service, or ML cluster dashboard onto localhost.
Local AI (Ollama)	You want local models running — for dictation, agents, or your own tools — without managing an Ollama server by hand.
Speech-to-Text	You'd rather speak a task card, commit message, or prompt than type it — and get clean text, on-device.
Text-to-Speech	You want to hear text spoken in a natural voice, synthesized on-device.
Image Generation	You want to generate images from a prompt on your Mac — a diffusion model or Apple Image Playground.
Dumps	You want a universal dump()/dd() viewer instead of an in-page dump.
CLI Usage	You want terminal parity with the app.