Laravel Herd

Laravel Herd is a blazingly fast, native Laravel and PHP development environment for macOS. It includes everything you need to start Laravel development, including PHP and nginx. Once you install Herd, you’re ready to start developing with Laravel:

Herd will install tools you need for development, like Composer, the Laravel installer, and more. You can also seamlessly migrate to Herd from Valet—Herd will automatically migrate existing Valet preferences:

Herd is a native macOS application so it will not work with Windows or Linux. It also uses static binaries and comes with a lot of PHP extensions that should fit most projects, but unfortunately, there’s no way to install additional extensions. Here’s a list of supported extensions at this time:

intl, pdo_sqlite, sqlite3, curl, openssl, tokenizer, bcmath, bz2, calendar, dba, ftp, iconv, mysqli, mbstring, xml, simplexml, ctype, dom, pdo, filter, session, zlib, fileinfo, pdo_mysql, posix, sockets, shmop, sodium, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, gd, zip, gmp, redis, xmlwriter, phar, exif, xmlreader, readline, pcntl, soap, imagick, ffi, opcache

Is Valet going away? According to Matt Staufer, the short answer is no; currently, Herd is using a Valet fork and will soon be powered by Valet:

Get started with Herd today at herd.laravel.com. Also, there’s documentation to help you get started and troubleshoot things if you run into any issues.