How does Anvil work?

Anvil uses Pow (pow.cx), a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Anvil uses Pow to run Rack apps, such as Ruby on Rails apps, but also to serve up static sites with good-looking .dev URLs.

Can Anvil run PHP websites?

Not at the moment. Due to the way Pow works, it isn't possible to serve up PHP sites using Anvil, and when Anvil is running, PHP sites will not work if Anvil's Pow process is running. You can however still run PHP sites through Apache, just make sure the switch in Anvil is set to off.

Here's a workaround for running Pow with Apache: https://github.com/37signals/pow/wiki/Running-Pow-with-Apache

Some work has been started on Pow to host any kind of site. Once that's merged in, hopefully Anvil will be able to host anything!

I'm having problems installing Pow

If the Pow installation process in Anvil doesn't work, you can install it directly from the terminal using curl get.pow.cx | sh Your sites under Anvil should then work just fine.

How do I uninstall Anvil?

First, click "uninstall Pow" in the Anvil settings menu. Once that task has completed, you can uninstall Anvil by deleting it.

This step is optional - if you'd like to keep Pow locally, just uninstall Anvil.

Help! I can't see my .dev domains!

There's a new feature in Google Chrome called "Asynchronous DNS" which may affect some .dev domains. You can disable this feature by browsing to chrome://flags/ and disabling it.

If the problem persists, or you're not using Google Chrome, you may have this issue with OpenDNS. Please set your DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to use Google's DNS servers.

My issue is not listed here

This might be an issue with the Pow, the engine behind Anvil. You can check for your issue in the Pow Issues GitHub page.