Laravel is my preferred way to set up a development environment on a local machine, such as macOS.

Requires PHP and Composer to be installed first (via install-system.sh). Installs Valet, trusts the local domain, sets up Mailpit and calls database.sh for the database.

./valet/install.sh

Installs MariaDB 11.8 (LTS) with the root password set to root. Runs as part of install.sh, but can also be run on its own to add or repair the database.

./valet/database.sh

MariaDB replaces MySQL here because Magento 2.4.7 no longer supports MySQL at all and 2.4.8 caps it at 8.4, while MariaDB 11.8 covers both versions. Both databases claim port 3306 and the var/mysql data directory, so the script asks you to remove any existing MySQL install before it continues.

Moves an existing MySQL install over to MariaDB, for machines that were set up before this change.

./valet/database-migrate.sh

It dumps every database to ~/valet-database-backup-<date>, uninstalls MySQL, deletes the old data directory and the MySQL my.cnf, runs database.sh and imports the dumps again. The uninstall and the delete cannot be undone, so it asks for confirmation first. Port, user and password stay the same (root/root), which means app/etc/env.php does not need to change.

When a run stops halfway, point it at the folder it already made to skip the dump and pick up at the install.

./valet/database-migrate.sh ~/valet-database-backup-20260816-191147

Syncs Valet configuration files.

./valet/setup.sh