Laravel Herd is a rapid and simple development setup that is designed to suit Laravel and PHP developers. Rather than spending time manually installing and configuring PHP, Nginx, Composer, Laravel tools, and other requirements, Herd puts it all in one simple package. After the installation, you can immediately begin working on Laravel projects without experiencing any setup issues and other technical frustrations.
Herd is created in order to promote local development, making it faster and more comfortable. It uses optimized static binaries of PHP, nginx, and dnsmasq, which helps websites and tests execute faster than many traditional PHP development setups. It also allows you to select and manage different versions of PHP, switch between them in the blink of a moment, and even designate certain versions of PHP to certain projects.
As a professional developer and team, Laravel Herd also has advanced tools via Herd Pro. These are local email testing, view of logs, support of Xdebug, team configuration files, local service management, and integration with Laravel Forge. This renders Herd applicable not just to individuals, however, but also to groups who desire a clean, consistent, and powerful Laravel development workflow.
