🧪 Laravel Homestead / Valet (Optional)
Laravel offers optional local development environments like Homestead and Valet to simplify and streamline your workflow depending on your system and preferences.
🏡 Laravel Homestead
Homestead is an official pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides a complete development environment without needing to install PHP, a web server, or a database directly on your machine.
- Works on Windows, macOS, Linux
- Uses
Vagrant+VirtualBoxorVMware - Supports PHP, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and more out of the box
Installation:
vagrant box add laravel/homestead
git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git ~/Homestead
bash init.sh
Learn More: Laravel Homestead Documentation
🚗 Laravel Valet
Valet is a super lightweight development environment for macOS that configures your Mac to always run Nginx in the background with minimal overhead.
- Only available for macOS
- No virtual machines — blazing fast
- Automatic
.testdomains (e.g.,my-app.test)
Installation:
brew install php
composer global require laravel/valet
valet install
Then link your Laravel project:
cd my-app
valet link
Learn More: Laravel Valet Documentation


