Local development with Laravel Sail

Sail is Laravel's own take on a Docker-based local development environment. It's essentially a docker-compose.yml file and a CLI wrapper script stored in your project. It's a good match if you want a per-project isolated environment that matches the "Laravel way" of doing things.

• laravel.com/docs/sail

# Installation

It comes pre-installed with new Laravel projects. For existing ones:

composer require laravel/sail --dev
php artisan sail:install
bash

# Usage

It's just Docker under the hood. You use the sail command to interact with it.

# Start the environment
./vendor/bin/sail up

# Run artisan commands
./vendor/bin/sail artisan migrate

# Run composer
./vendor/bin/sail composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle
bash

Tip: Configure a shell alias so you can just type sail instead of ./vendor/bin/sail.

# Comparison

Unlike Valet or Herd, Sail runs everything in containers. This means no pollution of your local machine, but it also means it's a bit heavier on resources (Docker Desktop required).

# Working with fortrabbit

Sail is for local development. When you deploy to fortrabbit, you are pushing your code, not the Docker containers. The platform handles the runtime environment for you.