Laravel + Valet workflow on Mac
Laravel developers on Mac often pair Valet or Herd for PHP with a pile of terminals for Vite, queue:work, Horizon, and the scheduler. Rig detects Composer and Laravel projects, links Valet *.test URLs, and runs sidecars from one board — with unified logs, port reclaim, and crash recovery. Tail storage/logs without hunting the filesystem. When Cursor or Claude is linked through the local MCP hub, agents see which artisan processes are healthy instead of guessing from a pasted stack trace. Keep Valet or Herd for PHP runtime and parked sites; add Rig when the morning boot is php artisan serve plus three other services. Open site uses the pretty .test hostname when linkage is detected. Reverb and the scheduler fit the same group. See the honest Rig vs Laravel Herd and Rig vs Laravel Valet comparisons for when to run both.
- Valet/Herd own PHP and *.test; Rig owns Vite, queues, Horizon, logs, ports, MCP
- Composer/Laravel detection with Valet URL linkage
- Artisan sidecars start, watch, restart with the rest of the board
- Works offline on macOS 13+
Do I still need Valet if I use Rig?
Usually yes for parked *.test PHP sites. Rig detects and opens those URLs; it does not replace nginx/PHP version management.
Can Rig run Horizon and queue workers?
Yes. Rig treats artisan sidecars like any other process — start, watch, restart, and stream logs together with Vite and your API.