Make bundled apps modular/optional

[marcsoler]

First of all, thank you so much for your work on Laragon! It’s an incredibly helpful tool, and I really enjoy using it as my local development environment.

That said, I wanted to suggest a potential improvement regarding the bundled applications like Notepad++, Git, and HeidiSQL. While I understand that these tools are included to provide a convenient out-of-the-box experience, many users (myself included) already have their preferred tools installed or simply prefer to use alternatives. In some cases, this leads to redundancy or even version conflicts.

Why this matters

• Git, Node.js, and Composer are already installed system-wide on most web development machines.
• Many developers have their own preferred editors (e.g., VS Code, Sublime Text, etc.).
• The same goes for DB clients — tools like DBeaver, TablePlus, and others are often preferred over HeidiSQL.
• The bundled apps tend to get outdated quickly, which adds extra maintenance overhead for you as the project maintainer.
• Some of these tools (like Git, Composer, Node.js) aren’t even required by Laragon itself, but are rather part of each user’s individual development workflow — making it more reasonable to leave their installation up to the user.
• These bundled apps can feel like unnecessary bloat and create double installations.

Suggestions

• Make the bundled tools modular or optional during installation.
• Allow more granular control over what gets installed (e.g., a checkbox list during setup or a custom install script).
  • For example, instead of silently installing Notepad++, ask the user what their default text editor is, or whether they want Notepad++ at all — similar to how the Git installer handles editor selection:
    
  • For Git, Composer, and Node.js: detect if these are already present in the system PATH. There's no need to install additional (and possibly outdated) versions alongside them.

This way, Laragon can focus even more on what it does best: being a fast, lightweight, and powerful local development environment — without the need to maintain third-party tools that many users may not need.

Thanks again for your great work! 😊