- How do I install Laravel Valet for Windows?
- It ships as a one-command Windows installer rather than a Composer library. Run the installer with local administrator rights; it elevates, registers Nginx and the database services, writes the Windows hosts file, adjusts PATH, and exposes a valet CLI. After that you can park a directory or link individual projects and browse to them at *.test. Expect firewall or antivirus prompts for the background services binding ports 80 and 443.
- Do I install cretueusebiu/valet-windows with Composer as a Laravel dependency?
- No. It is developer-environment tooling, not an application dependency: nothing in your codebase references it and no composer.json entry is created. It ships no service providers, facades, or config that touch production code. The blast radius is a single developer workstation and adoption is fully reversible.
- Which PHP versions does Laravel Valet for Windows support?
- Release 2.5.3 added PHP 8.4, so recent versions cover the PHP 8.x line. Valet supports per-site PHP switching, which means each developer can silently run a different interpreter than CI. That is convenient locally but a parity hazard, so pin sites to the version your pipeline uses. There is no formal published compatibility matrix beyond the release notes, so check those before standardizing.
- What is the difference between valet park and valet link?
- park serves every site inside a directory, using the folder name as the hostname (for example myapp.test). link maps one specific project directory to a hostname without parking its parent folder. Use park for a general Sites directory and link for one-off projects that live elsewhere.
- How do I fix port 80 or 443 already in use when installing Valet on Windows?
- The usual culprits are IIS, Skype, and existing XAMPP, Laragon, or WAMP installs. Stop or reconfigure whatever is bound to those ports, then restart the Nginx service. In a managed corporate fleet, antivirus or EDR tolerance of a new service listening on 80/443 is often the harder blocker than the port conflict itself.
- Is valet secure safe, and how does the trusted certificate work?
- valet secure generates a local certificate authority and installs it as a trusted root so your *.test sites serve over HTTPS. Trusting a root CA is a configuration-management event, so someone must own issuance and revocation across machines. Removing that trusted root during uninstall is the residue teams most often forget.
- Is valet share a data-egress risk?
- valet share tunnels a local site to a public URL, which is fine for demos and webhook testing. It becomes a genuine egress risk if the local site holds production-like data. Define an explicit policy on when sharing is permitted and what data may be present before it is used.
- Should I use Valet for Windows or Docker, Laravel Sail, or WSL2?
- If your team already standardizes on containerized parity with Docker Compose or Laravel Sail, or treats WSL2 as the sanctioned path, Valet Windows becomes a second, competing convention. Valet is a reasonable local mirror where production runs Nginx with PHP-FPM. Where production is Apache, or the fleet is containerized, expect parity and fragmentation problems rather than consistency.
- Is cretueusebiu/valet-windows actively maintained?
- It is a community project, not an official Laravel package; upstream Valet is macOS and Linux first, and this port tracks it at a distance. Roughly 910 stars and an active 2025 release are encouraging, but the contributor base is historically small. There is no SLA, no LTS policy, and no published compatibility matrix, so bus factor and Windows-version breakage are real risks to weigh.
- How do I completely uninstall Laravel Valet for Windows?
- Run the uninstaller, then verify what it leaves behind: Windows services, hosts file entries, trusted root certificates, and data directories are the typical residue. Uninstall quality is not formally documented, so audit the hosts file, the certificate store, and registered services manually. Leftover artifacts are exactly what make trying the tool expensive to undo.