Laravel Valet for Production Domains

January 8, 2023 · 2 min read

Recently, after a brief outage at work, I wondered if it would be possible to replicate the problem locally using Laravel Valet. My Google search landed on this StackOverflow post, where the answers shot down the idea. Not to be dissuaded by something I read on the internet, I started investigating if it was possible and stumbled upon what I think is a viable solution. There aren't very many hoops to jump through or major quirks so I believe it's not only possible but could be supported out of the box.

In my case, I want to proxy the domain scdn-app.thinkorange.com through my local version of the Laravel application.

  1. Edit ~/.config/valet/config.json on macOS and change the tld parameter from test to com.
  2. Change to the directory of your application.
  3. Run the command valet link scdn-app.thinkorange to set up our valet configuration to point the domain to this directory.
  4. Run the command valet secure scdn-app.thinkorange to set up the SSL certificate.
  5. Change the directory to dnsmasq cd ~/.config/valet/dnsmasq.d.
  6. Copy the existing TLD config to cover the .com domain with the command cp tld-test.conf tld-com.conf.
  7. Edit the new file to change the first address line to address=/.com/127.0.0.1 and save the file.
  8. (Optionally) Isolate the site to PHP 8.1 with the command valet isolate --site scdn-app.thinkorange php@8.1.
  9. Change your /etc/hosts file to redirect the domain to 127.0.0.1 for ipv4 and ::1. I use the excellent Gas Mask to make this step easier.

Now we should have a functional production proxy through our local machine. This configuration creates a few problems around keeping the com TLD. Fortunately, a few extra steps are necessary for us to switch back to .test while also keeping this site functional.

  1. Edit ~/.config/valet/config.json again and change the tld parameter from com back to test. This change will immediately break our site.
  2. Change to the Sites directory cd ~/.config/valet/Sites.
  3. If we use ls -al to list the directory, we'll see our site scdn-app.thinkorange. Let's change that.
  4. Run the command mv scdn-app.thinkorange scdn-app.thinkorange.com.

Our site should now be working again. We are also able to continue serving our previous local test domains.

Because we can create a permanently functional system using these steps, I believe it should be possible to create a pull request to reduce the number of hoops we have to jump through. I'd love to be able to run valet link scdn-app.thinkorange.com. with a period at the end to denote I'm including the full domain with TLD. That would eliminate the temporary step of editing the config.json file, and the Sites directory would just work(TM) as it would include the .com directory name. I don't believe we even need the dnsmasq changes as I'm able to navigate to a functional site without them. I believe Gas Mask is doing the work, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

If you'd prefer a YouTube video where I stumble through recreating these steps from scratch: