How I Launch a Laravel Testbed

Sometimes I need to spin up a quick Laravel instance on my Mac to test something out. With just a couple keystrokes, I can get a brand new Laravel instance running in a Docker container, ready for my IDE and testing. Here’s how.

Why do I even need to do this? Of course I have a bunch of client projects I could hijack - but I’m a professional and I won’t do that.

I also know that if I don’t make this automated, I won’t do it. So, I automated the process. Here’s how I did it.

The What

This is what is going to happen.

• Create aliases in the ZSH shell (this will likely work in other shells)
• Use Laravel Sail to control Docker instances
• That’s it. It’s pretty simple.

Ok - for this example, you must have a Mac and have PHP + Composer installed globally. But then, that’s it! Oh. And Docker. But then, that’s it! Also, I’m using Orbstack with Docker.

The How

First, let’s edit our .zshrc file to add two aliases.

alias sail='vendor/bin/sail '

alias new-laravel='composer create-project laravel/laravel '

If you’re familiar with Laravel Sail, you’ll recognize the first alias. It’s actually a more simple version of the suggested one. In their example, they handle when you have the sail command installed globally. I don’t do this.

So, let’s explain.

The first allows us to type sail instead of vendor/bin/sail whenever we want to run a Laravel Sail command in our project.

The second is a shortcut for creating a new Laravel project. Remember, we will have to specify our name after the command.

Now, let’s get to the real stuff

Next, we’re going to create a project called “donkey” at localhost. It’s really simple, actually.

new-laravel donkey
cd donkey
php artisan sail:install
sail up -d

That’s it. Now, you have a Laravel project running at localhost (or whatever you configured in your .env file).

Sail is a great temporary development tool. But, make sure to use the exact same configuration of your production system when you’re developing something long term.