I think we’ve all had that moment where we have our Lamp/Mamp/Xampp programs installed and want to get to work on making some websites, only to be horrified by the url you have to use to access your files.
Like “http://localhost/websites/laravel/project”, or even worse have difficulty setting it up because the framework is not really made for these links, like Magento.
For Linux and Mac there is a great piece of software made by the people at Laravel called Valet
What is Valet?
Valet is the piece of software that links the tools you need to develop together in an easy to use command line interface.
What does it do?
Once you have installed it and run valet link in “my-website” it will tell “DNSMasq” to create a link for “my-website.test”,
and it will tell Nginx that “my-website.test” is located in “my-website”.
Now you can go to “my-website.test” and see your site pop-up without having the ugly and sometimes problematic urls.
And you will not have to work with Nginx or Apache configs yourself since Valet uses “Drivers” to properly show websites like WordPress Bedrock, and with a bit of PHP you can even make your own driver!
What does it not do?
This will not install PHP or a Database engine for you, you will have to do that yourself.
nor will it install any PHP extensions for you.
How do i start using it?
The basic setup is quite easy, we first need PHP and Composer installed so we can install Valet and keep it up to date.
Then we simply run composer global require cpriego/valet-linux and wait for it to install.
If that has completed we can run valet install to install and set up the other requirements for valet.
Once that is done you can try pinging a .test domain and see if it responds:ping domain.test if it responds with 127.0.0.1 you are ready to go, and this will start every restart so you will never have to worry about starting this up.