Laravel Herd

About

Laravel Herd is a Mac app that gives you a native PHP and Laravel stack for every project on your machine. You install it once and manage everything in one place, without external dependencies. Herd installs the infrastructure Laravel expects, including PHP, nginx, DNS, Node, nvm, Composer, and the Laravel installer, so they are ready together without containers or dependency chains.

Each site in Herd has its own settings, including its URL, workspaces with their own domains, database, queue, cache, and broadcasting services, PHP and Node.js versions, and HTTPS. Herd can serve sub-folders as local .test domains, switch PHP versions per project, and share a herd.yml file. Parallel workspaces give each branch its own copy of your app, domain, and database. Services such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis can be added in a click, and the .env values are ready to copy.

Herd also supports agentic development. With Laravel Boost, coding agents can use the Herd CLI to analyze dumps and queries, test emails, and enable HTTPS. Herd is used by more than 90,000 developers, and a separate version is available for Windows.