Sherpa and Sidecar: two new ways into Statamic

The two have little in common technically. What connects them is the audience. Both are aimed at people who don’t use Statamic yet: Sherpa at those who have never set up a Laravel project, Sidecar at teams whose content already lives somewhere else.

Sherpa: Statamic without the terminal

A new Statamic site normally starts with Composer, a local PHP setup, and a few commands. Sherpa replaces that with a desktop app. You pick a starter kit from the Marketplace or start blank, choose flat files or a database, and Sherpa serves the site locally under a .test address. Addons install with a click, and Composer runs in the background.

The app also covers the steps after that. It commits and syncs with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. Dynamic sites, including the control panel, deploy to Laravel Cloud. Static builds go to Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. It stores API tokens and deploy keys in the macOS Keychain instead of the project files.

Sherpa doesn’t need Herd, but it works alongside it. It also recognizes existing Statamic sites in a folder, detects their version, and installs the dependencies.

The blog post names designers, writers, and WordPress developers as the audience, along with clients and marketing teams. In the announcement, Jack McDade also says the command line still offers more control. The current version is 0.1.0, an alpha. It runs only on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later, and it is free. Sherpa is the team’s first Mac app.

Sidecar: the control panel for Markdown you already have

Many documentation sites run on static site generators. The content sits in Markdown files with front matter, and the navigation lives in a file such as navigation.php or sidebar.json. Developers edit it in Git. For writers and support staff, that is a hurdle.

Sidecar puts these files into the Statamic control panel without importing them. It creates no collections and no copies in the Stache. The files stay where they are, and the generator keeps building the site. In the control panel, each source gets a drag-and-drop page tree, an editable blueprint, and Live Preview through the generator’s own renderer.

The work is done by drivers. A driver knows where a generator keeps its files, how it nests pages, and what has to change when a page moves. Sidecar ships with drivers for LaraDocs, Jigsaw, VitePress, and HydePHP. The README lists Hugo, Astro, and Docusaurus as open slots for anyone who wants to write a driver.

Sidecar is a Composer package for Statamic 6, released under the MIT license. In a Laravel-based project such as LaraDocs or HydePHP, it is installed into the same app with composer require statamic/sidecar and php please install:sidecar. For VitePress and Jigsaw, you set up a separate Statamic site and point it at the existing files.

McDade calls Sidecar experimental. Its APIs and file-writing approach may still change, and the team hasn’t tested it on large VitePress or Jigsaw sites. He recommends using it with Git and trying it on a branch first.

What this means for your sites

For developers who already build Statamic sites, Sherpa changes little. Composer, Git, and a local setup are part of the job. Sherpa becomes interesting where someone else needs a working site: a designer testing a starter kit, or a client’s marketing team that wants to try Statamic before a project starts. Its deploy targets are Laravel Cloud, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages. Many Statamic sites, including most of the ones I build, run on a classic server or shared hosting, and Sherpa doesn’t deploy there.

Sidecar is worth knowing if a client runs a documentation site on VitePress, Jigsaw, or HydePHP and wants non-developers to edit it. Until now, the Statamic answer would have been to migrate to collections. Sidecar leaves the generator in place and adds the control panel on top. Because it is experimental, try it on a branch before a client’s production docs depend on it.