Laravel: Up & Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. The Laravel Ecosystem

As Laravel has grown, the Laravel team has built a suite of tools to support and simplify the lives and workflows of Laravel developers. Much of the new work has gone straight into the core, but there are quite a few packages and SaaS offerings that aren’t part of the core but are still very much a part of the Laravel experience.

We’ve already covered quite a few of them, and for those I’ll provide pointers to where to go in the book for more information. For the tools we haven’t covered, I’ll give each a quick description and a link to the relevant website.

Tools Covered in This Book

We’ve already taken a look at these, but here are some brief reminders of what they are and links to where you can find the relevant sources in the book.

Valet

Valet is a local development server (for Mac, but with forks for Windows and Linux) that makes it quick and easy to serve all of your projects to your browser with almost no effort. You’ll install Valet globally on your local development machine via Composer.

With a few commands you can have Nginx, MySQL, Redis, and more serving every Laravel app on your machine at a .test domain.

Valet is covered in “Laravel Valet”.

Homestead

Homestead is a configuration layer on top of Vagrant that makes it simple to serve multiple Laravel applications from a Laravel-friendly Vagrant setup.

Homestead was introduced briefly in “Laravel Homestead”.

Herd

Herd is a native macOS/Windows app that wraps Valet and its dependencies ...