Now that I’ve been actively developing applications with the Laravel framework for a few years, I thought I’d write down the tools and services I tend to use on a regular basis in that work.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching and experimenting with these tools and their alternatives in order to make a choice, so maybe it will help someone else who hasn’t gone through that yet. I’m always glad when others share details about their development environments so that the rest of us who are just getting going can build on that foundation.
Hardware and Development Environment
- MacBook Pro 13″
- PhpStorm with Laravel Idea
- Laravel Valet
- Git and GitHub
Launching a New Project
composer global update laravel/installer laravel new example-app --git --branch="main" cd example-app valet link valet secure example-app
Then I create a database, add the DB info in .env, run artisan migrate, and I’m ready to develop. Sometimes I have to make sure PhpStorm has the right coding standards and PHP Code Sniffer config in place.
Sometimes I add a .psysh.php file to my project repo with these contents:
<?php
DB::listen(function ($query) {
dump("[{$query->time}ms] {$query->sql}");
if ($query->bindings) {
dump($query->bindings);
}
});
When using artisan tinker, this prints out any SQL queries that were run by a given command within the tinker session, for faster debugging.
For WordPress projects, I use a customized version of this “valetpress” bash script to initialize new projects.