In this entry, we are going to learn how we can add additional extensions used by Laravel Herd, which is the new Laravel development environment starting with version 10 on MacOS and 11 of Laravel for Windows; It is an environment very similar to the one we have in Laragon with Windows, where we can install and manage Laravel dependencies such as PHP, Node, among others.

Additional Extensions in Laravel Herd

As is normal in software development, it is often necessary to install additional extensions with which to use certain functionalities or install certain packages, so let's get started.

Installing Additional PHP Extensions

Laravel Herd includes the PHP extensions necessary to develop in Laravel, but if we want to install additional dependencies, you have to follow the following steps:

Once you have downloaded the DLL of the page on which you want to install the extension, you simply have to copy the extension to the php dll folder in Windows.

On MacOS, we can use Homebrew:

brew install php

To install an extension:

pecl install [extension-name]

Then, in both cases, whether Windows or MacOS, you must activate the extension from php.ini:

Herd/config/php/<version>/php.ini

And this is everything you need to know to add extensions to your Herd; As you can see, the steps are similar to any other environment like Laragon