Developing PHP applications has never been as easy as it is with minimalistic development environment offered by Valet. Valet, popularly known as ‘Laravel Valet,’ is a minimalistic PHP development environment for Mac users. It configures your Mac to run PHP built-in server in the background when the machine starts and utilizes only small amount of RAM as it does not include Vagrant, Apache, Nginx, or any /etc/hosts files. Valet supports PHP development frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP 3 and also WordPress.
Any PHP developer who is looking for an easy way to get a development environment running without the use of heavier software or looking for an out-of-the-box development option can opt for Laravel valet. The valet offers a simple, lightweight and fast development environment to the developers so that they can easily create and share websites publicly via the local tunnels. One of the best things about Valet is its easy set up that can be effortlessly set up in no time with no complicated configurations required. Developers are not even required to make the valet aware of the technology or type of their app. All they are required to do is to drop the core files of the application into a folder in their machines and then access the site in their own browsers.
Installing Valet
Installing Laravel valet is a very easy and straightforward task. All you need is to have some few things pre-installed in your system before itself. For example, to install valet, the two main things you will need in your system are Homebrew and Composer. Then using Homebrew, you will need to install PHP 7. You will require a database for which MariaDB (According to Taylor Otwell) could be a better option than MySQL with Homebrew.
Valet is a great choice of development environment for developing PHP applications that do not need anything else besides PHP 7 and a database for their core functionality. Whether a developer wants to just test something in his application or wants to just work out on his idea, valet is just a great option to go for because it will eliminate all those time consuming and dirty installations required for such minute tasks.
Setting Up a PHP Website (WordPress)
It is possible to set up a simple environment for running a WordPress (the open source CMS based on PHP) website using valet’s WordPress driver. Added advantage here is that zero configuration is required for this set up as the valet is smart enough and can itself understand which driver to use. The two options or commands (park and link) will do everything for the set up process. While park is used to add whole folder to the valet, link option is meant for single site, without having to add whole directory.
Sharing the Site
One of the coolest benefits of valet is the ability it provides to share a website with just a single command i.e ‘valet share’. As you type ‘valet share’ in terminal app, the valet will setup a secure tunnel to your local host and give you a link to share. You can do some similar and really cool things to your site with ngrok using valet. No need to set up a staging site to just share something that you are doing locally with someone. No screenshots. No domains or sub-domains are required. It’s just as easy as typing a command.
So, are you looking to develop PHP application or website for your business and want experts to help you? Then, here we are. At Grey Matter India, we take pride to be a leading PHP development company in India offering quality development services to meet intent needs of the enterprises. We have experienced developers and defined development standards to foster reliable development practices at our firm. Just contact us to know more about us and get a free quote for your needs.
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