F-Bar manual

These are the menu items you will find when you click on F-Bar’s icon in the menubar.

Refresh

This option refreshes the list of servers. F-Bar is periodically refreshing the list of servers you have connected to your Laravel Forge account, but sometimes you want to update the list manually.

Open Terminal Here

Opens the topmost window in Finder in your favorite Terminal app. In the Preferences (intern länk), you can choose between built-in Terminal, iTerm2, or Hyper.

Servers

Here is a list of all your active servers. Each server has these options:

  • Open Terminal – a shortcut to open your selected server in the preferred terminal app.
  • Copy IP address – copies public IP of the selected server to your clipboard.
  • Open in Forge – direct link to selected server in Laravel Forge.
  • Reboot – reboots the whole server.
  • Reboot PHP – reboots PHP. This option reboots the default version of PHP that is selected for your server.
  • Reboot MySQL
  • Reboot Nginx
  • Reboot Postgres
  • Upload SSH-key – Uploads your computer’s default SSH key to Laravel Forge. Using this feature, you don’t have to upload the SSH via Laravel Forge’s interface. The first time you are SSH-ing into a server. Use this option to upload the key, wait a few seconds before logging in via SSH.
  • Test Nginx Config – you can check whether its configuration syntax is correct. This is especially useful if you have made changes or added a new configuration to the existing configuration structure. This feature uses Laravel Forge to validate. Under the hood, it’s nginx -t.
  • Logs – a variety of valuable logs: Nginx access- and error logs, PHP, and database logs.

Sites

It shows every site for each server. Each server has these options:

  • Deploy – this will trigger a deployment of the current site.
  • Reboot PHP – restarts PHP and the Opcache. If you have multiple versions of PHP on your server: this option will restart the version used to this specific site.
  • View Deployment Log – retrieves the deployment log.
  • Open Terminal – shortcut to opening a terminal window with the path to this site prefilled.
  • Deployment script – edit the deployment script.
  • Edit .env - Edit the .env-files for your Laravel project. If it’s not a Laravel project, this will return an empty result. If you leave APP_DEBUG=true, you will get a quick confirmation that this is intended.
  • Edit Nginx Configuration – Edit the Nginx Configuration. Unfortunately, due to the async nature of a REST-API, it’s not possible to check the syntax of the Nginx config before deploying it. However, under “Servers,” you have the option to test it after deployment.
  • Visit Site – opens the site in your default web browser.
  • Open Forge – shortcut to Laravel Forge opened in your browser.

Preferences

API Key

This is where you Paste in the API key from your Laravel Forge account. Note that F-Bar supports multiple accounts, so you can have several API keys and manage many Forge accounts from your menubar.

How to get started

General

  • On Login – automatically launch F-Bar.
  • Dock – Show F-Bar icon in Finder Dock. This can be handy depending on your workflow Under the hood, F-Bar is using app-URLs.
  • Open Terminal in – Sets your default terminal-app, which F-Bar will open in various shortcuts. Please note that the first time you launch macOS will present a security dialog to grant permission to F-Bar to run AppleScript. Without this permission, it will not work.
  • Servers – see Servers section
  • Editor Theme – a theme for editor and log views in F-Bar. Set a dark mode if you don’t want to hurt your eyes.;-)

Servers

  • Hide in Menu – Hides servers from the menubar list. This can be useful to an early accessed server. The server will still be accessible from the menu on the left if you enable it again (and Laravel Forge’s web GUI, of course).
  • Use Internal IP – If you want to use the internal IP using the” Open Terminal”-shortcut.

Monitor

F-Bar can work as a simple site monitor. The monitoring runs as a separate process and uses cURL under the hood. This means that it is pretty fast and low memory footprint even if you have 50+ sites. If the monitoring service would crash for some reason, it will not crash the entire app.

The monitoring service sends an HTTP request to every site at a given interval. This service is not part of the Laravel Forge API. Instead, this uptime monitor runs locally on your machine.

When an error occurs, you will be given a notification on your desktop.

  • Perform a check every – set an interval for the checks.
  • Check sites on launch – when F-Bar launches, and it will perform all the checks.

More Settings…

  • Disable monitoring for this site – Select a site on the left and check this box if you don’t want to monitor a site.
  • URL Alias – If the site name in Laravel Forge is different than what you are using, you can add an alias here. It also changes the” Visit Site…” menubar item.

Read more

Updates

Settings on how often F-Bar will look for updates.

Notifications

With F-Bar, you can get desktop notifications when a deployment is done. This works by adding a short URL to the deployment webhook in Laravel Forge. The F-Bar servers will then send a request to the Apple Push Notification server (APN), then pass the message to F-Bar. On launch, F-Bar will register with APN to receive notifications.

How to setup notifications

Dismiss notifications

You can specify an interval in seconds for how long you want the notifications should be visible on the desktop.

Monitor Logs

Display and view monitoring logs for any failures.