Laravel Development Environment on Windows

I have been creating web applications with the excellent Laravel PHP framework for about two and a half years. On macos I have always used PHPStorm IDE and Valet with a local install on MySQL. When on Windows I use Homestead. I have found that Homestead can suffer form performance issues on Windows so I set about looking for an alternative. There is a Windows version of Valet that uses Acrylic DNS Proxy to serve your dev sites with pretty URL’s and although this works fine it requires a local install of MySQL. I wanted to see what was out there and came across Laragon. This is a package for developers and contains all you need for working with Laravel. It has pretty url’s, MySQL (other databases are available), reddis, and plenty of other tools. It is simple to install and setup. Give it a try. It may not be sufficient for professional developers, but for me on my Windows PC which is used by all the family for browsing and gaming it’s a perfect dev environment that can be turned off and on.