in this Laravel tutorial, We’ll explore valet, which is a development environment for macOS minimalists. It’s a lightweight Laravel development environment that uses approximately 7 MB of RAM.
Laravel Valet configures your Mac always to run Nginx in the background when your machine starts. You can use DnsMasq – is a Valet proxies for all requests on the *.test domain to point to sites installed on your local machine.
It’s an alternative of Sail or Homestead tool for local Laravel environments. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels.
Laravel valet GitHub
You can also access Laravel Valet on github: https://github.com/laravel/valet.
Prerequisites
Please make sure your machine satisfies the following requirements before proceeding with the valet installation:
macOSoperating system- Homebrew installed: This is a package manager for
macOS. - PHP installed in your system
- Composer installed: This is a dependency manager for PHP.
Installation of Laravel Valet
Let us take you step-by-step through the process of setting up your development environment, installing Valet, and configuring it for Laravel.
Installation Of Homebrew
Please make sure that Homebrew is running and up to date using the update command. Open Terminal and run the following command to update Homebrew:
brew update
Install Composer
Let’s install composer(php package manager) using the below command:
brew install composer
Make sure the Composer global bin directory is in your system’s $PATH:
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"
Install PHP
Next, you should use Homebrew to install PHP:
brew install php
Check PHP version:
php -v
Finally, You can install Laravel Valet as a global Composer package:
composer global require laravel/valet
Now, install all dependencies of valet by running the following command:
valet install
This command will configure and install Valet and DnsMasq
How To Change PHP Version
Valet allows you to switch PHP versions using the valet using the below command.
valet use [email protected]
Or by using .valetrc file, You need to create this file in the root of your project.
[email protected]
Laravel Project Setup
In case you don’t already have one, open your projects folder and start a new Laravel project:
laravel new my-laravel-project
Valet Park
Open the command line and navigate the directory where you store your Laravel projects, and run the following command:
valet park
The above command will automatically detect and serve any Laravel projects within this directory.
Accessing Your Laravel Project
Visit http://my-laravel-project.test in your web browser. Valet automatically creates a secure URL for your Laravel project.
Conclusion
We have successfully installed and configured Laravel Valet into your Mac system. You can develop, test, and deploy Laravel applications easily by using this tutorial. You can refer to the official Laravel Valet documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/valet.
