What it means
Nothing in a loam site points at the machine it happens to run on. Where the install stands is read from the environment when it starts, never written into the site. The same files render the same everywhere.
How loam does it
- The engine sits beside your site. It lives in one folder,
.loam/, next to yours. An update swaps parts of the engine and touches nothing of your content. - What you have keeps working. Offline, without a check, for as long as you like. A licence buys the stream of updates, never a dependency: lose access and you keep a working site, not a broken one.
- A mirror is the whole site. The git mirror of your site is not a backup that needs a restore procedure — it is the site. A local copy is not an export — it is the site.
- Nothing to migrate. No database means no schema to migrate, no plugin tables to reconcile, no cache to warm. Moving a site is moving its files.
That is also why there is no separate desktop product: Bedrock ships the same engine and points it at a copy of your files. Not a desktop version of loam — just loam, elsewhere.
What it costs
There is no content that differs per machine. What should differ — a path, the PHP binary — lives in a handful of environment keys, not in the site. And the engine refuses to know where it is: it works out its root from its own position and trusts the host to have put it there. Rules you only notice when you try to break them.