Laravel Herd is a fast PHP development environment that just launched a version for Windows. Herd sets you up with all the components you need to develop Laravel or even plain PHP applications including an Nginx web server, PHP, and Composer.
Base features include:
- Easily generate new Laravel apps that are automatically set up with local
.testdomains (e.g.https://demo.test). - Manage which version of PHP different applications are using (good for legacy applications)
- One click set up of https
- Integration with Expose to make development sites accessible with others over the internet (good way to share works-in-progress with clients, colleagues, etc.)
The Pro version includes:
- Ability to manage services like MySQL, Redis, etc.
- Development mail server
- Interface to capture the output of dd and dump statements
As a follow-up to this walk through of Herd on Windows I have a guide on how to manually setup MySQL to work with Herd (so you don’t have to pay for the Pro version). Check that out here: MySQL with Laravel Herd on Windows