Laravel Valet 3 Released With Multi-Version PHP Support

The Laravel team released the next major version of Laravel Valet (3.0), which introduces running multiple versions of PHP in Valet applications side-by-side.

Previously, you could specify which version of PHP Valet used to serve applications locally using valet use php@7.2, but now you can do so on a per-site (including a default) basis using the following commands:

1cd path/to/app
2 
3# Isolate the current project
4valet isolate php@7.4
5 
6# Isolate a site by name
7# This command will also install the PHP version
8# if it's not already installed.
9valet isolate php@8.0 --site=laravel9x

After isolating a site, you can see that my local Valet install is serving projects using various isolated PHP versions:

And another application using the default installed version of PHP (v8.1):

Another challenge you might run into with this setup is running commands on the CLI with the matching PHP version. What I do is create a symlink to the brew version of PHP somewhere in my path:

1ln -s $(brew --prefix php@7.4)/bin/php $HOME/bin/php74
2 
3php74 --version
4PHP 7.4.28 (cli) (built: Mar  3 2022 06:26:49) ( NTS )
5...

Using this version of PHP, you can prefix commands to composer, etc.:

1php74 $(which composer) install

You might also need to symlink other binaries like pecl in the same way to install extensions.

PHP Monitor

Off the heels of PHP Monitor 5.0 for macOS, the author released PHP Monitor 5.2 with support for Valet 3, making management of isolated PHP versions a breeze:

For further details, check out the PHP Monitor 5.2 release post, which includes information on how to source multiple versions of PHP from the command line using a CLI helper provided by phpmon.

Upgrade Today

To upgrade to Valet 3, you can run the following composer command to update and install the latest version of Valet (hat tip to @jakebathman):

1composer global require "laravel/valet:^3.0"

Afterward, be sure to run valet install to finish installing. Congratulations to all the contributors, especially Nasir Uddin Nobin, Matt Stauffer, and everyone else involved in working on Valet 3!