windows 10 dev enviroment setup phpstorm laravel

Windows 10 Dev Environment Setup for PHPStorm and Laravel

If you're interested in using Sail with an existing Laravel application, you can simply install Sail using Composer's package manager. During installation, you'll be asked to choose which Sail-supported services your application will interact with.

To learn how to create a new Laravel application, please consult Laravel's installation documentation for your operating system. Luckily, Laravel Sail is automatically installed with all new Laravel applications, so you can start using it immediately. Sail is supported on macOS, Linux, and Windows (via WSL2).

The sail script provides a command-line interface (CLI) with convenient methods for interacting with the Docker containers defined by the docker-compose.yml file. Sail offers a great starting point for building a Laravel application using PHP, MySQL, and Redis without requiring prior Docker experience.

At its core, Sail is the docker-compose.yml file and the sail script stored at the root of your project. Laravel Sail is a lightweight command-line interface for interacting with Laravel's default Docker development environment.

While setting up Sail might seem intimidating, we're impressed by its fast performance and flexible configuration. We decided to opt for a Laravel setup with WSL and native PHP, MySQL, and Nginx installation and configuration.

In comparison to other solutions like Laragon, which is quite good but not as fast, we found that our solution can handle multiple apps with different PHP versions at the same time. Additionally, it's faster and more efficient than Laragon, which can only handle one request at a time (single-threaded).

If you need even more performance for heavy requests, these tools may not be sufficient. For example, php artisan serve is not suitable for complex operations and requests with large databases.

At Laracraft, we've tried many Windows-based local Laravel development environments but were unhappy with the performance and usability of known environments like Laravel Sail, Laragon, Vagrant/Homestead, etc. Our solution provides a better balance between performance, usability, and flexibility, making it an ideal choice for developers working on complex Laravel projects.

Windows 10 dev enviroment setup phpstorm laravel