For years, the answer to "how do I try Statamic?" has started with "okay, first open your terminal." And for years, we've watched that certain kind of person — the designer, writer, tinkerer, or WordPress dev who almost switched away — quietly close the tab right there.

Well, not anymore. Today we launched Sherpa — a free, native Mac app that can take you from "I want a Statamic site" to "my Statamic site is live on the internet" without opening the terminal once. No Composer. No installing Herd or MAMP Pro, no PHP environment wrangling, brew casking, or dot file wangjangling.

Download it, double-click it, make a site. How neat is that?

What Sherpa actually does

Sherpa handles the entire lifecycle of a Statamic site — the parts that used to require a terminal, all the way through deploying to a server.

• Start a new site — pick a starter kit from the Marketplace (or start blank) and Sherpa sets everything up for you. Choose between flat file and database.
• Preview on your Mac — your site runs locally with a real .test address. No server setup, no config files.
• Install addons — browse the Marketplace and install addons with a click. Composer runs behind the scenes where it belongs.
• Version control everything — Commit, push, and pull your changes to and from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Cursor Origin. Git is built right in.
• Go live — publish dynamic sites (Control Panel and all) to Laravel Cloud in one click.
• Or ship it static — build static HTML and deploy to Netlify or Cloudflare Pages instead.

Every one of those bullets used to be a tutorial, but now they're just little buttons you can click with your fancy ergonomic mouse.

"But I already know how to use a terminal"

Great! Genuinely. Sherpa isn't trying to take your shell away from you — it's for everyone who was never going to open one in the first place. There will always be more power available on the command line.

Statamic has always been a developer-first CMS, and it still is. But the Control Panel has always been more than good enough that non-developers could run a whole site with it (and with Starter Kits, never write a line of code) — they just couldn't get to it without a developer setting everything up first. Sherpa removes that last gatekeeper. Your client, your marketing team, even your dad with the fishing blog idea — they can all get to a running Control Panel now.

And honestly? Even if you live in the terminal, one-click "new site from a starter kit with https and git already wired up" is pretty darn nice. You can see all your Statamic sites in one place — Free or Pro, local or deployed, whatever — without digging through folders.

And if you're already running Laravel Herd, Sherpa detects it and plays nice with your existing setup. We've got some ideas brewing for how to make Sherpa genuinely useful for power users too — more on that later.

It works with your existing sites too

Point Sherpa at a folder containing any Statamic site and it detects the version, installs dependencies, and starts serving it locally. Nothing about your site changes — no lock-in, no special Sherpa-flavored project structure, no extra metadata files scattered around your repo.

Your API tokens and deploy keys live in the macOS Keychain, not in your project files, so they can't accidentally end up committed to a repo. It's nice and clean.

The details

• macOS 14+, Apple silicon — native, fast, signed and notarized.
• Totally free — just free as free can be.
• Windows/Linux? Not yet. We'd rather do one platform really well than three platforms badly. If/when that changes, we'll let ya know.

One honest disclaimer: it's an alpha

This is an alpha build — v0.1.0, to be exact. It's also our first macOS app ever, so be kind. Now that it's a signed, notarized app living inside Apple's sandbox (with all the permission and memory quirks that come with it), there are probably some bugs and edge cases we haven't hit yet with our dev builds.

That's not us hedging — the happy path works great and we use it ourselves. It's us saying: if you find something weird, tell us. Early feedback is exactly how this gets from 0.1.0 to 1.0.

Go make something

Head to sherpa.statamic.com, download the app, and build a site this afternoon. Pick a starter kit, poke around the Control Panel, hit publish, and send us what you make — we'd love to see it.

Found a bug? Have an idea? Come hang out in Discord or file it over at Sherpa Basecamp — the home for Sherpa bug reports and feature requests. We're just getting started with this thing. 💜