Introduction

Valet is the Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. Without Vagrant, there is no need to configure the /etc/hosts file. You can even share your site publicly using local tunnels. Yeah, we like it too.

Laravel Valet sets up your Mac to always run the Nginx service in the background after booting. Valet then uses DnsMasq to proxy all site requests directed to the locally installed computer to domain names ending in *.test.

In other words, a blazingly fast Laravel development environment only takes up 7MB of memory. Valet is not intended to completely replace Vagrant or Homestead, but to provide another option that is more flexible, convenient, and takes up less memory.

Valet supports but is not limited to the following:

Of course, you can also use custom driver to extend your Valet.

Valet or Homestead

You should know that Laravel also provides another local development environment, Homestead. The difference between Homestead and Valet is the target audience and approach to local development. Homestead provides a complete Ubuntu virtual machine with automated Nginx configuration. If you want to implement a fully virtualized Linux development environment on Windows/Linux, Homestead is a good choice.

Valet is Mac only and requires you to install PHP and the database server directly onto your local machine. This can be easily achieved by using Homebrew commands such as brew install php and brew install mysql. Valet provides an extremely fast, minimally resource-intensive local development environment, ideal for developers who only need PHP/MySQL and do not need a virtual development environment.

Valet and Homestead are both excellent choices for configuring a Laravel development environment. Which one to choose simply comes down to personal preference and the needs of your team.

Installation

Valet requires macOS system and Homebrew. Before installation, make sure that no other program (such as Apache or Nginx) is occupying port 80 of the local machine.

After installing Valet, you can try to ping any *.test domain name on the terminal using a command similar to ping foobar.test . If Valet is installed correctly, you can see the response from 127.0.0.1 on the terminal.

Valet will automatically start its process every time the machine starts. So once Valet is initialized, there is no need to run valet start or valet install again.

Use another domain name

By default, Valet uses the .test top-level domain name to serve your project. If you want to use another domain name, you can use the valet domain tld-name command.

For example, if you want to use .app instead of .test, run valet domain app, Valet will automatically change the site's top-level domain name is *.app.

Database

If you want to use a database, please run brew install mysql@5.7 in the terminal to install MySQL. Once the installation is complete, you can start MySQL using the brew services start mysql command. You can then connect to the database at 127.0.0.1 using the root username and an empty string password.

PHP Version

Valet allows you to switch PHP versions using the valet use php@version command. If the specified version is not installed yet, Valet will install the specified PHP version through Brew:

valet use php@7.2valet use php

Upgrade

You Valet can be updated using the composer global update command in the terminal. After the upgrade, if necessary, it is best to run valet install again so that Valet can upgrade the configuration files.

Upgrade to Valet 2.0

Valet 2.0 moves Valet’s underlying web server from Caddy to Nginx. Before upgrading to this version, you should stop and uninstall the existing Caddy process by running the following command:

valet stop
valet uninstall

Next, upgrade Valet depending on how you installed it (usually via Git or Composer). If Valet is installed through Composer, you should use the following command to update to the latest major version:

composer global require laravel/valet

If you have updated the source code of Valet, you should execute the install command:

valet install
valet restart

After the upgrade, It may be necessary to reset or relink your site.

Service Site

After Valet is installed, you can start setting up the site. Valet provides two commands to serve Laravel sites: park and link.

##park Command

that is all. Now, any Laravel project you create in the "parked" directory will automatically be accessed using http://folder-name.test.

link Command

valet secure laravel

valet unsecure laravel

/**
 * 确定驱动程序是否满足请求。
 *
 * @param  string  $sitePath
 * @param  string  $siteName
 * @param  string  $uri
 * @return bool
 */
 public function serves($sitePath, $siteName, $uri){ 
    return is_dir($sitePath.'/wp-admin');
    }

/**
 * 确定即将到来的请求是否针对静态文件。
 *
 * @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;
        }

/**
 * 获取对应用程序的前端控制器的完全解析路径。
 *
 * @param  string  $sitePath
 * @param  string  $siteName
 * @param  string  $uri
 * @return string
 */
 public function frontControllerPath($sitePath, $siteName, $uri){
     return $sitePath.'/public/index.php';
     }

class LocalValetDriver extends LaravelValetDriver{   
    /**
     * 确定驱动程序是否满足请求。
     *
     * @param  string  $sitePath
     * @param  string  $siteName
     * @param  string  $uri
     * @return bool
     */ 
      public function serves($sitePath, $siteName, $uri){ 
             return true;    
             }    
    /**
     * 获取对应用程序的前端控制器的完全解析路径。
     *
     * @param  string  $sitePath
     * @param  string  $siteName
     * @param  string  $uri
     * @return string
     */
     public function frontControllerPath($sitePath, $siteName, $uri){    
         return $sitePath.'/public_html/index.php';  
           }
    }