Laravel Herd 2,157 (https://herd.laravel.com 2,157 ) is a desktop application for macOS and Windows that installs the local stack without a package manager or containers: native PHP 7.4 to 8.5, switchable per site, nginx 75 , Node through nvm 95,199 , and the php, composer and laravel commands. The current release is 1.30.0 of 19 August 2026; there is no Linux version, and none is planned.
Its central idea is the parked directory, ~/Herd (%USERPROFILE%\Herd on Windows): every folder inside is served as <folder>.test, so laravel new bookshop there followed by herd open shows http://bookshop.test, resolved by a bundled dnsmasq on macOS and hosts-file entries on Windows. Herd is free; Herd Pro, $99 a year for one user or $299 for ten, adds managed MySQL 524 , PostgreSQL 1,289 and Redis 2,763 , a mail catcher, and log and dump viewers.
Herd was not run for this book: it changes the Windows host's hosts file and services, and everything here runs inside Ubuntu 225 , where Herd does not exist. On macOS it supersedes Valet 2,604 , which parked directories the same way from the command line.