The Missing Laragon Feature (Until I Wrote It)

: 14 Jul 2026

the laragon site index with multiple joomla web sites

A while ago I wrote about why I use Laragon as my Windows development environment in my article, Laragon – The High Performance AMP Server for Windows.

Laragon does almost everything I want from a local development environment. It's fast, lightweight, easy to configure and, unlike some alternatives, it doesn't seem determined to consume every available system resource just because it can.

There was just one thing missing.

As the number of local websites on my machine grew (and let's be honest, if you develop with Joomla the number always grows), there was no single place to see them all. Yes, I could remember the URLs. Yes, I could bookmark them. No, I wasn't going to do either.

A Better Start Page

So I wrote one. I've published it on GitHub as Laragon Joomla Index. The idea is deliberately simple. Drop the file into your Laragon installation and that's it. No configuration. No editing. No maintaining a list of sites. The page scans your Laragon www directory and builds itself dynamically every time it's loaded. Create a new site and it appears automatically. Delete one and it disappears. There's nothing to keep in sync because there's nothing to sync.

Joomla Gets Special Treatment

As I only build Joomla sites, it seemed sensible to make life even easier. If the script detects that a site is running Joomla, it doesn't just create a link to the front end. It also adds a direct link to the Administrator interface. It sounds like a tiny feature, but when you're constantly jumping between half a dozen development sites, removing one extra click soon adds up. Non-Joomla sites still appear in the list; they simply get a front-end link.

Keeping It Simple

This project is deliberately kept simple. It isn't trying to become a dashboard, a project manager or an all-singing, all-dancing control panel. It's just a single page of links that updates itself automatically. If that's all you need, then hopefully you'll find it useful.

If, however, you're looking for something much more powerful, then you should definitely take a look at Laragon Dashboard. In fact, an early version of that project was what inspired me to write this script in the first place. Since then it has grown into a comprehensive dashboard packed with features.

It's an excellent project, but it's become far more than I personally wanted. I just wanted a simple page that listed my sites and let me jump straight to the front end—or, in the case of Joomla, directly into the Administrator.

Built for Developers Who Forget Things

Like many little utilities I write, this one exists because I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. Instead of remembering whether the site I wanted was client.test, client2.test, newclient.test or client-final-final-v2.test, I now just open the index page and click. It's hardly revolutionary. It's just convenient. Sometimes the best developer tools aren't the ones that save hours. They're the ones that save five seconds, dozens of times a day.