There are two popular ways to set up Laravel/PHP development environment on macOS: Valet and Homestead. Both are good for development, but their approach is different. Valet is a minimalistic, fast development environment, but Homestead offers a full vagrant virtual machine – with all its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s dive into the strengths and weaknesses of both.
Valet
Good
Easy to set up
Fast – it is basically just Nginx with dnsmasq
No configuration is necessary when you add a new project, just create a folder in your the webroot and you are ready to go
It starts automatically with the operating system
No need for provisioning/startup/ssh
Bad
You have to install all the other necessary services like PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc manually, but it is easy to do on mac with Homebrew
If you have projects which require different versions of PHP, switching between the PHP versions could be tricky. Update: since Laravel 5.7 it is easy to switch between PHP versions using the valet use php@version command.
Homestead
Good
It provides a full Ubuntu virtual machine
All necessary services are preinstalled
Easy to install other Linux services and binaries if necessary
Work on both macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the same development environment can be set up for every team member regardless of os.
Bad
It is slow. And sometimes even slower.
Every new project requires a new entry in Homestead.yaml and /etc/hosts
Npm run dev runs extremely slow in vagrant, so it is better to run it outside, directly on mac, but all PHP commands (e.g. artisan) and composer should run in Homestead, which can be confusing sometimes
Setting up debugger requires some more effort compared to Valet (especially for PHP CLI)
Both of these systems work well for PHP development, and as the documentation states, these are intended for different audiences. It depends or your taste and your team’s needs which one suits you better. My choice is Valet.
Tags: Homestead · development · macOS · PHP · Valet
