Set Up Valet on macOS for Local WordPress Development

This is a guide on how to set up Laravel Valet on macOS for a WordPress local development environment. Using Valet as a WordPress local development solution has the main benefits of speed, being lightweight and using fewer configurations to go wrong than say a solution like Vagrant.

There is a 2nd related article that looks at getting WordPress themes, plugins and settings already installed and ready to deploy.

Valet runs only on macOS and runs directly on top of the operating system, not in a virtual container.

The key software components needed are Homebrew; a package manager and Laravel; a PHP framework.

Valet itself has an Nginx, PHP 7.3 and DnsMasq and by default uses the .test domain name, you add in a database MariaDB or MySQL. Once the software is all installed Valet itself will launch automatically on startup of macOS.