My Laravel Development Kit 2025 - Windows and macOS

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Since Laragon is no longer free, I no longer recommend using it for development. We have other tools you could use, such as Docker directly. Although, honestly, I've never really liked Docker for developing with Laravel, as it's a bit more laborious. However, it's completely usable.

If you're comfortable working with Docker, remember that you can use it alongside Laravel Sail, which works perfectly on both Windows and Mac (and I think also on Linux, since Docker is cross-platform). But as I said, I no longer recommend using Laragon under any circumstances, unless you want to pay or need a specific feature that's really worth it. Otherwise, to work with Laravel, you don't need it.

Recommended Alternative: Laravel Herd

The approach I recommend now is Laravel Herd. Remember that it's available for both Windows and Mac. It was even initially released for Mac and later for Windows. So you have support for both systems.

And the database?

That was always the "Achilles' heel" with Herd, since Laravel automatically included MySQL or MariaDB. To overcome this, you can use DBngin, which is another tool that, if I remember correctly, was initially only available for Mac, but is now also available for Windows.

That's why I wanted to record this video: to show you the development kit I recommend for Laravel 2025.

Laravel 2025 Development Kit

Whether you're using Mac or Windows, you can use both tools perfectly. Here you can see that they work perfectly for me: I have Laravel Herd with my projects and, on the other hand, DBngin running without any issues.

Note: We can also work with Laravel without a database like MySQL, since it comes with SQLite by default, which I think is excellent. In fact, it's the one I usually use in my courses.

Why do I prefer MySQL in real-world projects?

Personally, when I work on real-world projects that I know will grow in tables, migrations, and models, I prefer to use MySQL because it allows me to edit, customize, or change the database more easily.

With SQLite, changing a database can be a headache. It's happened to me in courses where, for example, I forgot a letter in a table and had to modify it or add a new column. Yes, that can be done with migrations, and in fact, that's the recommended approach with any modern framework.

But when I'm working on a real-world project and need to constantly modify or create migrations just to change a table, I prefer to do it manually.

The problem is that to reflect those changes with migrations, you often have to run a migrate:refresh, which deletes all the tables and recreates them. This isn't feasible in a production project.

Therefore, I prefer to apply the changes manually to the database and, if necessary, generate the corresponding SQL to run it directly in the production environment. Something that would be a bit more complicated with SQLite.

Conclusion: My Ideal Environment

So, the goal of this video was to show you my recommended development environment for Laravel in 2025:

1. Laravel Herd
2. DBngin
3. (Optional) TablePlus as a visual database manager, which you can also install. Although you can use any other, DBngin already comes with direct access configured.