At one of my old jobs, I was having to switch between PHP versions when working on various different projects. At the time my dev setup used something like Laragon, which was a dev stack manager. Over time I became frustrated with how difficult it was to switch between PHP versions, especially when using the CLI. Restarting terminals to refresh the PATH became very irritating.

So I made pvm. Initially I made it with Laravel Zero, but running the CLI you're using to change PHP versions with the PHP installation you're changing became very brittle. If you went back to PHP 5.6 or early PHP 7 (which I had to do for a legacy project, god save me) then the CLI would break and you'd end up stuck because Laravel Zero didn't support versions that old. It's a great version of the framework but it wasn't good for my usage.

I was learning Go at the time, and decided to give pvm a shot in Go. Since then I've added the ability to toggle extensions and an installer.

Unfortunately, I now develop on arch pretty much all the time, so I don't really use it much other than on my renderer servers, which you can learn a bit more about here.