Laravel Valet

Valet is a Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, no hosts file. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels. Yeah, we like it too.

Laravel Valet configures your Mac to always run Nginx in the background when your machine starts. Then, using DnsMasq, Valet proxies all requests on the *.test domain to point to sites installed on your local machine.

In other words, a blazing fast Laravel development environment that uses roughly 7mb of RAM. Valet isn't a complete replacement for Vagrant or Homestead, but provides a great alternative if you want flexible basics, prefer extreme speed, or are working on a machine with a limited amount of RAM.