LARAVEL

Laravel Valet – Simplifying PHP Dev Environment


For a long time, there was really no special PHP Development Environment. Everyone just fired up their laptops, opened their editors and served their web applications using wamp, mamp or xampp.

Laravel came into the scene and changed the game. It’s so amazing to see the creator of a framework care so much about the development environments of developers using the framework. Taylor Otwell went ahead to release Homestead to fill this void.

Homestead is a full blown awesome development environment that replicates your production environment. Memcache, Redis, Nginx and several others are ready for use out of the box. You can read more about it here  . Homestead is totally great. I use it 99% of the time, but sometimes it can be a pain because you have to configure a lot of things and seriously there are many web developers out there who struggle a lot with the sysadmin side of things.

There are also many web developers out there who just want to crank out software and not bother about the so many geeky What if we could save them from drowning in this seemingly deep devOps Ocean?…I..I..think we just got a lifeboat, BOOM!!..LARAVEL VALET!!

Just recently, Laravel Valet a new development environment was launched by Taylor Otwell ( Laravel Creator) and Adam Wathan of Tighten.co.

Laravel Valet is a minimalist PHP dev environment for Mac Users. No Vagrant, No Apache, No Nginx, No /etc/hosts file. It runs your PHP built-in server in the background when your machine starts. Guess what? It only utilizes about 7MB of RAM. Valet isn’t a complete replacement for Homestead, but provides a great alternative if you want flexible basics, prefer extreme speed, or working on a machine with a limited amount of RAM. Laravel Valet also allows you to spin up new Laravel apps and domains in a matter of seconds.

I wanted to have the convenience of php artisan serve without ever having to runphp artisan serve – Taylor Otwell

 

I have tried and tested it, it’s amazingly so simple to set up. In less than 3 mins, I was up and running! That’s what you call ZONDA!

This reminds me of http://pow.cx/ for the Ruby on Rails Community. Knocking out Rails and Rack Apps like a BOSS.

One really good feature of Laravel Valet that keeps knocking me out is the Sharing feature. On a normal day, you would have to buy a domain name, set up hosting, create a database online or use Heroku to generate a domain name and still set up everything I just mentioned on Heroku before you can share what you are working on with your friends. If you are a bit more technical, you might have heard of ngrok, a tool you can use to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet which involves some configuration and setup.

Now, Laravel Valet takes advantage of that tool. You don’t have to worry about anything. All you need to do is just run the valet share command and it gives you a shareable url to send to your friends, family and enemies to see what you are working on straight from your localhost. What a time to be Alive!

screen shot 2016-05-09 at 4 18 44 am

That’s me running the command on my machine.

ngrok

That’s me running the website on my Iphone & I can easily share that url to anybody..Just too cute right?..I know!

If you want to use Laravel Valet, please head over to the Laravel documentation here. It’s very robust and explanatory.

Adam Wathan also released a hilarious video showing how to install and use Laravel Valet. You should totally check it out.

If you want to learn the inner workings of Laravel Valet like I did, you should check out Mohammed Said magical blog post here

If you have any questions, observations or feedback, please let me know in the comments section below.

 

 

PROSPER OTEMUYIWA

About PROSPER OTEMUYIWA

Food Ninja, Code Slinger, Technical Trainer, Accidental Writer, Open Source Advocate and Developer Evangelist.