Liminal

A browser-based Laravel IDE. PHP 8.4 runs entirely in WebAssembly — no server, no installs, no uploads. Write, run, and preview Laravel applications without leaving the tab.

liminal.aschmelyun.com — deployed as a static site on Cloudflare Pages. Feel free to try it out; everything you type and build is sandboxed entirely to your browser and never leaves your machine.

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Features

| View | Description | |------|-------------| | Preview | Navigate routes and see rendered HTML output. Tailwind CSS v4 is injected automatically. | | Code | Browse and edit project files with syntax highlighting (PHP, Blade, JS/TS, JSON, CSS). | | Terminal | Run Artisan commands directly in the browser with command history. | | Agent | OpenAI-powered assistant that reads/writes files and runs Artisan to build features. | | Tools | Import from GitHub, export as .zip, sync to a local folder, and configure settings. |

Additional features:

• Share URLs — encode your file diffs into a URL; anyone who opens it gets your changes applied automatically
• Dark mode — light, dark, or system theme, persisted across sessions
• Local sync — mirror the virtual filesystem to a local folder via the File System Access API (Chrome/Edge)

Tech Stack

• Vue 3 + TypeScript + Vite
• Tailwind CSS v4
• CodeMirror 6
• @php-wasm/web-8-4 — PHP 8.4 compiled to WebAssembly

Running Locally

bun install

Before building, make sure Composer dependencies are installed inside the embedded Laravel app:

cd ../liminal/app   # path to the Laravel project
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

[!NOTE] I gotta figure out a way to do this without Composer and without having to commit the whole dang vendor directory.

Then build and preview:

bun run build
bun run preview

bun run build bundles the Laravel app into public/app.zip, runs type checking, and produces the final static assets. bun run preview starts a local web server serving that output — use this rather than bun run dev when you need to test the full built artifact (e.g. WASM chunk reassembly).

Build pipeline

The build runs three steps:

1. bundle-app.js — zips the Laravel project from ../liminal/app into public/app.zip
2. vue-tsc — TypeScript type checking
3. split-wasm.js — chunks WASM files >24 MB into .wasm.part* files with a manifest, required for Cloudflare Pages' file size limit

How It Works

On boot, the app downloads app.zip and extracts it into an in-memory virtual filesystem. From that point on, all PHP execution — routing, database queries, Artisan commands — happens entirely client-side via the WASM runtime. There is no backend; the production deployment on Cloudflare Pages is purely static files.

SharedArrayBuffer is required by the WASM runtime and needs Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless headers, which are configured in both the Vite dev server and public/_headers for Cloudflare Pages.

Limitations

• No network access from PHP (no file_get_contents over HTTP, no curl, no Composer)
• The vendor/ directory is pre-bundled in app.zip and cannot be modified
• SQLite only — no MySQL/Postgres
• Performance is slower than native PHP, especially on first boot

License

This project is licensed under MIT, but uses php-wasm which is licensed as GPLv2. If you're cloning this project or using it in your own derivitive works, just keep that in mind!