Replacing MAMP with Laravel Valet for Local Development

My new Macbook Pro came in today. Instead of migrating all of the data from my old machine, I decided to start fresh. I followed Carl Alexender’s post on how he set up his new Macbook, but tweaked it for my workflow.

I’ve been a MAMP user for years, and for the most part it has been great. Sure, its a little slow and buggy at times, but it has gotten the job done. I even tried Vagrant with VVV for a while, but it was too resource intensive for me. I work on a small team, so sharing server configurations across multiple team members isn’t that important to me.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do is use Laravel Valet to serve all of my local development. I’ve been learning Laravel over the last couple months, which is how I was introduced to it in the first place.

While learning Laravel, I decided to give Laravel Valet a shot. A couple of commands in the terminal, and I was set up with a local environment and a *.dev domain mapping without having to touch my hosts file. Was it really that easy? Yeah, pretty much.

I really like how everything is controlled from the command line. I don’t have to wait on a clunky GUI to load, or click through tons of options that I really don’t need. I like to keep everything as simple as possible.

On top of that, Valet is configured to work with both Laravel and WordPress out of the box (and some other frameworks too). I don’t have to do anything special to get it to work. I create a directory, install the WordPress files, and connect my database. That’s it.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with Valet long term, but for now its how I’m doing my local development.

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