Laravel Valet

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.

• What Is It?
• Installation
• Serving Sites
  • The "Park" Command
  • The "Link" Command
• Sharing Sites
• Viewing Logs
• Other Useful Commands

What Is It?

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 PHP development environment that uses roughly 7mb of RAM. No Apache, No Nginx, No /etc/hosts file.

Installation

Valet requires the Mac operating system and Homebrew.

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 composer global require laravel/valet.
5. Run the valet install command. This will configure and install Valet, 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.

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 such 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.
• Now you may simply open http://blog.dev in your browser.

It's just that simple. 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 just want to serve a single site in a directory and not the entire directory.

• To use the command, navigate to one of your Laravel applications 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 may simply 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, simply navigate to the site 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. It's just that simple.

To stop sharing your site, simply 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. Squash those bugs!

Other Useful Commands

• 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 prune (Remove paths that no longer exist from 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)