Laser Stack

Introduction

Laser Stack is local Laravel development stack powered by docker like Laravel Sail and multi-project like Valet. Aims to be small and fast. It's opinionated: it does not support everything under the sun but it's configurable, you can customize the container to suit your needs.

It supports macOS, WSL2, WSLg (Windows) and Linux and it needs docker.

Laser has a shell script around docker-compose as an interface to it, it exposes all docker-compose commands and extends it with it's own subcommands.

Inspiration

Laser was inspired by Laravel Sail small footprint and Valet multi-project capabilities.

Goals / Design decisions

Be as small, simple and fast as possible:

do not try to protect you from docker: if you try something that needs the stack up while it's down you will get the raw docker-compose error.
simple and single shell script (laser) serve as an interface
low number of containers: app, db and you can configure if you want redis and elasticsearch.
small containers: Almost all containers are Alpine Linux based
simple build process, only a single container is built
nginx-based http serving, faster than php-based solutions
prebuilt public images for related services (database, redis and ngrok)

Limitations

Currently we support Laravel, Symfony, Wordpress and overridable per project nginx config, those are examples, additional drivers PR's are welcome.
DNS resolution needs to be manually managed through /etc/hosts.

Versions

Currently it uses the following versions of software:

PHP v8.2.0RC7, v8.1.13, v8.0.26 or v7.4.33
MySQL v8.0.31
PostgreSQL v15.1
node v16.17.1
npm v8.10.0
yarn v1.22.19
composer v2.4.4
redis v7.0.5
elasticsearch v7.14.2

Getting started

Clone Laser Stack in the same directory which you store your Laravel projects (~/src for example):

git clone https://github.com/sdbruder/laserstack.git

Copy env.example to .env:

cp env.example .env

Edit your .env to your liking. By default it's using php 8.1 (7.4, 8.0, 8.1 or 8.2RC7) and mysql 8.0 (mysql or postgreSQL).

Define also the usernames and passwords for mysql por postgresql and which containers you want to run defining the PROFILES variable.

Setup an alias or add laserstack directory to your path:

# alias setup
alias laser=~/src/laserstack/laser
# or add ~/src/laserstack/laser to your $PATH in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:
export PATH=$PATH:~/src/laserstack

Now you can start your dev stack:

laser up -d

And to get a shell in a particular project:

cd ../myproject
laser shell

To stop it:

laser stop

To look additional laser commands:

laser help

PROFILES setup

PROFILES define a comma separated list of additional containers you want to run. Available containers:

mysql
postgres
redis
memcached
elasticsearch

PROFILES Examples

app and mysql: PROFILES=mysql
postgres and redis: PROFILES=postgres,redis
mysql, redis and elastic: PROFILES=mysql,redis,elasticsearch
mysql and memcached: PROFILES=mysql,memcached

Other frameworks support

Out of the box Laser Stack supports multiple Laravel projects. There is additional drivers supporting Wordpress and particular nginx configs.

To configure a particular nginx config for a project, create a laserstack-nginx.conf file in your project root directory and call laser scan. Laser Stack will copy it as YOURPROJECTDIRECTORY.conf. in the app your project will be in /var/www/YOURPROJECTDIRECTORY.

Every time you add or remove a non-Laravel project, you need to call laser scan to allow Laser Stack to adjust it's nginx config.

Laravel and Wordpress are simple examples of support drivers. Additional drivers submitted as pull request are welcomed.

DNS resolution

Add .local names in your /etc/hosts so Laser Stack can identify which project you are trying to access. For example for projecta and projectb (directory names):

127.0.0.1  projecta.local
127.0.0.1  projectb.local

You can add a dnsmasq config to resolve every *.local to 127.0.0.1 automatically, but that's beyond the scope of this introduction.

License

Laser Stack is open-sourced software licensed under BSD license.

sdbruder / laserstack