Laravel Herd

Laravel Herd provides a native development environment for Laravel and PHP on macOS. It bundles the necessary binaries for PHP, Nginx, Composer, the Laravel installer and Expose, allowing developers to start a Laravel project without installing additional dependencies or configuring containers. The tool includes a site wizard and PowerShell integration for managing local sites, and it offers built‑in services such as MySQL and Redis that can be started and stopped from a single interface.

The environment emphasizes speed by using plain binaries rather than virtual machines, and it supplies features for debugging and logging. Dump output from `dump()` or `dd()` calls is captured and displayed in a dedicated window, while local log files can be searched and mail sent by the application can be intercepted for inspection. Xdebug integration is provided out of the box.

Additional capabilities are available in the paid Herd Pro tier, which adds advanced debugging tools, team‑sharing of site configurations, and direct integration with Laravel Forge. The core product is stable and targeted at developers who need a ready‑to‑use Laravel stack on macOS.