Troubleshooting Laravel Valet on macOS Sierra

September 23, 2016 / Eric L. Barnes

macOS Sierra was released just a few days ago and everybody is starting to upgrade. Some users of Laravel Valet have reported some problems and Adam Wathan has put together a list of common problems and troubleshooting tips to help resolve issues he’s been seeing.

With his permission to post here is a list of things to look for:

All I see is “It works!”

Apache is running on port 80 and interfering with Valet.

1. Stop Apache: sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl stop
2. Restart Valet: valet restart

Valet randomly dies

You are probably still on Valet <= 1.1.19, it’s recommended to pin to ^1.1.22.

First, edit ~/.composer/composer.json to point to ^1.1.22 like this:

```diff
- "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
+ "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",
```

Next, run composer global update and then restart Valet with it’s valet restart command.

Every time I refresh I see a totally random file!

You are running Caddy 0.9.2, which has a known bug related to fastcgi connections.

Edit your ~/.composer/composer.json to point to ^1.1.22 like this:

```diff
- "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
+ "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",
```

Next, run composer global update, ensure you are now running Caddy 0.9.1 by running ~/.composer/vendor/laravel/valet/bin/caddy -version and finally restart Valet valet restart

I’m getting a 502 Bad Gateway error.

Usually, this means something is messed up with PHP FPM. The first step is to confirm that FPM is not running:

ps aux | grep fpm

You should see at least two processes there if PHP FPM is running (one is grep, ignore that one.) Chances are PHP FPM is not running.

Next, check the PHP FPM error log to find out why it’s not running:

cat /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log

Try to resolve any errors you see. Here’s a few common ones:

• /var/run/valet/fpm.socket does not exist
• Failed to open configuration file /usr/local/etc/php/7.0/php-fpm.conf

Problem: /var/run/valet/fpm.socket does not exist!

If you see an error similar to:

Unable to bind listening socket for address ‘/var/run/valet/fpm.socket’: No such file or directory

in the file /usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log, you were probably running dev-master and have now switched back to tagged releases.

Valet 1.1.22 attempts to automate fixing this issue by explicitly configuring where PHP FPM should listen.

First make sure ~/.composer/composer.json points to ^1.1.22:

- "laravel/valet": "^1.1.19",
+ "laravel/valet": "^1.1.22",

Then run composer global update and finally valet install.

Problem: php-fpm.conf is missing!

Something went wrong when installing PHP through Homebrew. This seems to happen on fresh non-upgrade installations of macOS Sierra.

1. Uninstall PHP 7: brew uninstall php70
2. Reinstall PHP 7 from source: brew install php70 --build-from-source
3. Re-run valet install

Where to Look for Valet Errors?

If you are still running into problems, here’s a list of log files to check:

Caddy start log:

/tmp/com.laravel.valetServer.err

PHP FPM error log:

/usr/local/opt/php70/var/log/php-fpm.log

Caddy error log:

~/.valet/Log/error.log

Hopefully with this guide you will be able to pinpoint any errors you have and can fix them through either Brew or Composer.

Filed in: News / Valet