Laravel Valet

• Introduction
• Installation
• Serving Sites
  • The "Park" Command
  • The "Link" Command
• Sharing Sites
• Viewing Logs
• Custom Valet Drivers
• Other Useful Commands

Introduction

Valet is a Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, No Apache, No Nginx, No /etc/hosts file. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels. Yeah, we like it too.

Laravel Valet configures your Mac to always run PHP's built-in web server in the background when your machine starts. Then, using DnsMasq, Valet proxies all requests on the *.dev domain to point to sites installed on your local machine.

In other words, a blazing fast Laravel development environment that uses roughly 7mb of RAM. Valet isn't a complete replacement for Vagrant or Homestead, but provides a great alternative if you want flexible basics, prefer extreme speed, or are working on a machine with a limited amount of RAM.

Valet supports Laravel, Lumen, and Statamic.

Installation

Valet requires the Mac operating system and Homebrew. Before installation, you should make sure that no other programs such as Apache or Nginx are binding to your local machine's port 80.

1. Install or update Homebrew to the latest version.
2. Make sure brew services is available by running brew services list and making sure you get valid output. If it is not available, add it.
3. Install PHP 7.0 via Homebrew via brew install php70.
4. Install Valet with Composer via composer global require laravel/valet. Make sure the ~/.composer/bin directory is in your system's "PATH".
5. Run the valet install command. This will configure and install Valet and DnsMasq, and register Valet's daemon to launch when your system starts.

Once Valet is installed, try pinging any *.dev domain on your terminal using a command such as ping foobar.dev. If Valet is installed correctly you should see this domain responding on 127.0.0.1.

Valet will automatically start its daemon each time your machine boots. There is no need to run valet start or valet install ever again once the initial Valet installation is complete.

Database

If you need a database, try MariaDB by running brew install mariadb on your command line. You can connect to the database at 127.0.0.1 using the root username and an empty string for the password.

Serving Sites

Once Valet is installed, you're ready to start serving sites. Valet provides two commands to help you serve your Laravel sites: park and link.

The park Command

• Create a new directory on your Mac by running something like mkdir ~/Sites. Next, cd ~/Sites and run valet park. This command will register your current working directory as a path that Valet should search for sites.
• Next, create a new Laravel site within this directory: laravel new blog.
• Open http://blog.dev in your browser.

That's all there is to it. Now, any Laravel project you create within your "parked" directory will automatically be served using the http://folder-name.dev convention.

The link Command

The link command may also be used to serve your Laravel sites. This command is useful if you want to serve a single site in a directory and not the entire directory.

• To use the command, navigate to one of your projects and run valet link app-name in your terminal. Valet will create a symbolic link in ~/.valet/Sites which points to your current working directory.
• After running the link command, you can access the site in your browser at http://app-name.dev.

To see a listing of all of your linked directories, run the valet links command. You may use valet unlink app-name to destroy the symbolic link.

Sharing Sites

Valet even includes a command to share your local sites with the world. No additional software installation is required once Valet is installed.

To share a site, navigate to the site's directory in your terminal and run the valet share command. A publicly accessible URL will be inserted into your clipboard and is ready to paste directly into your browser. That's it.

To stop sharing your site, hit Control + C to cancel the process.

Viewing Logs

If you would like to stream all of the logs for all of your sites to your terminal, run the valet logs command. New log entries will display in your terminal as they occur. This is a great way to stay on top of all of your log files without ever having to leave your terminal.

Custom Valet Drivers

Out of the box, Valet supports Laravel, Lumen, and Statamic. However, you can write your own Valet "driver" to serve PHP applications running on another framework or CMS. When you install Valet, a ~/.valet/Drivers directory is created which contains a SampleValetDriver.php file. This file contains a sample driver implementation to demonstrate how to write a custom driver. Writing a driver only requires you to implement three methods: serves, isStaticFile, and frontControllerPath.

All three methods receive the $sitePath, $siteName, and $uri as their arguments. The $sitePath is the fully qualified path to the site being served on your machine, such as /Users/Lisa/Sites/my-project. The $siteName is the "host" portion of the domain, which is simply the site name, such as my-project. The $uri is the incoming request URI such as /foo/bar.

Once you have completed your custom Valet driver, place it in the ~/.valet/Drivers directory using the FrameworkValetDriver.php naming convention. For example, if you are writing a custom valet driver for WordPress, your file name should be WordPressValetDriver.php.

Let's take at a sample implementation of each method your custom Valet driver should implement.

The serves Method

The serves method should return true if your driver should handle the incoming request. Otherwise, the method should return false. So, within this method you should attempt to determine if the given $sitePath contains a project of the type you are trying to serve.

For example, let's pretend we are writing a WordPressValetDriver. Our serve method might look something like this:

/**
 * Determine if the driver serves the request.
 *
 * @param  string  $sitePath
 * @param  string  $siteName
 * @param  string  $uri
 * @return void
 */
public function serves($sitePath, $siteName, $uri)
{
    return is_dir($sitePath.'/wp-admin');
}

The isStaticFile Method

The isStaticFile should determine if the incoming request is for a file that is "static", such as an image or a stylesheet. If the file is static, the method should return the fully qualified path to the static file on disk. If the incoming request is not for a static file, the method should return false:

/**
 * Determine if the incoming request is for a static file.
 *
 * @param  string  $sitePath
 * @param  string  $siteName
 * @param  string  $uri
 * @return string|false
 */
public function isStaticFile($sitePath, $siteName, $uri)
{
    if (file_exists($staticFilePath = $sitePath.'/public/'.$uri)) {
        return $staticFilePath;
    }

    return false;
}

Note: The isStaticFile method will only be called if the serves method returns true for the incoming request and the request URI is not /.

The frontControllerPath Method

The frontControllerPath method should return the fully qualified path to your application's "front controller", which is typically your "index.php" file or equivalent:

/**
 * Get the fully resolved path to the application's front controller.
 *
 * @param  string  $sitePath
 * @param  string  $siteName
 * @param  string  $uri
 * @return string
 */
public function frontControllerPath($sitePath, $siteName, $uri)
{
    return $sitePath.'/public/index.php';
}

Other Useful Commands

Command	Description
valet forget	Run this command from a "parked" directory to remove it from the parked directory list.
valet paths	View all of your "parked" paths.
valet restart	Restart the Valet daemon.
valet start	Start the Valet daemon.
valet stop	Stop the Valet daemon.
valet uninstall	Uninstall the Valet daemon entirely.