Laravel Valet 3 Released With Multi-Version PHP Support

The Laravel team released the next major version of Laravel Valet (3.0), which introduces running multiple versions of PHP in Valet applications side-by-side.

This super exciting new feature is now officially released, as a part of Valet 3!

To update:
1. Update your global Valet constraint to "^3.0"
2. Run `composer global update laravel/valet`
3. Run `valet install`
4. Party On, Wayne!https://t.co/nBH6rds7ha https://t.co/PvtLKHzx96

— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) March 29, 2022

Previously, you could specify which version of PHP Valet used to serve applications locally using valet use php@7.2, but now you can do so on a per-site (including a default) basis using the following commands:

cd path/to/app
 
# Isolate the current project
valet isolate php@7.4
 
# Isolate a site by name
# This command will also install the PHP version
# if it's not already installed.
valet isolate php@8.0 --site=laravel9x

After isolating a site, you can see that my local Valet install is serving projects using various isolated PHP versions:

And another application using the default installed version of PHP (v8.1):

Another challenge you might run into with this setup is running commands on the CLI with the matching PHP version. What I do is create a symlink to the brew version of PHP somewhere in my path:

ln -s $(brew --prefix php@7.4)/bin/php $HOME/bin/php74
 
php74 --version
PHP 7.4.28 (cli) (built: Mar  3 2022 06:26:49) ( NTS )
...

Using this version of PHP, you can prefix commands to composer, etc.:

php74 $(which composer) install

You might also need to symlink other binaries like pecl in the same way to install extensions.

#PHP Monitor

Off the heels of PHP Monitor 5.0 for macOS, the author released PHP Monitor 5.2 with support for Valet 3, making management of isolated PHP versions a breeze:

🚀 PHP Monitor 5.2 is now available!

Most notable: this release adds support for Valet 3. With this new version of Valet, you can now easily set a version of PHP *per domain*! 😎

⬆️ `brew upgrade phpmon`

📝 Learn more: https://t.co/cCAE5R3U0g

🔗 https://t.co/AJs0AzXRWn pic.twitter.com/U9WtWyAst7

— Nico Verbruggen (@nicoverbruggen) March 29, 2022

For further details, check out the PHP Monitor 5.2 release post, which includes information on how to source multiple versions of PHP from the command line using a CLI helper provided by phpmon.

#Upgrade Today

To upgrade to Valet 3, you can run the following composer command to update and install the latest version of Valet (hat tip to @jakebathman):

composer global require "laravel/valet:^3.0"

Afterward, be sure to run valet install to finish installing. Congratulations to all the contributors, especially Nasir Uddin Nobin, Matt Stauffer, and everyone else involved in working on Valet 3!