A post about Laragon
Laragon is probably the best Windows based localhost environment at the moment. I used to use XAMMP back in the day, but soon outgrew that when I first discovered Movamp, a tiny portable localhost that I used a lot a few years ago. Its now defunct and too much hassle to make an updated version, though I'm sure that's possible. I then gravitated to UniServe, which was tidy, small and also portable. I now run Laragon, because it's a very smooth and tidy local host, extremely versatile, and though can obviously be installed on the PC itself, I run it portable for convenience. It's enough for me for most projects.
Laravel
Soon though, portable Laragon wont be enough as I want to learn how to build a Laravel environment, mainly because Im very keen on running Bookstacks. I also think that Pressbooks self hosted needs Laravel, but its Bookstacks that interests me. Open publishing is a wonderful thing and though I may not be able to self host online for others to use, I can still potentially run Bookstacks from desktop and publish my own work as well as that of others.
Why Windows?
Apart from in the very early years of my dev work I have always worked in MAMP localhost, and progressed up to a Grunt workflow with Sassy CSS, so also learned about installing Node Packages and Ruby, and working in terminal for that as well as for basic git versioning. But now I want to extend my experience to become familiar with how to do this on Windows machines. Ive enjoyed the git journey too but that's for another post.
Full size image (click)
A screenshot of the Laragon taskbar icon, right click view, with PHP libraries for Grav
