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Services

Herd Pro provides an interface that allows you to spin up complementary services to your site easily. These services can be databases, queues and broadcasting systems, but also search engines and storage providers that mimic your production environment. You can combine these services with a herd.yml in your project and store the site configuration for a project within the repository. This makes it super easy for others to spin up a development environment with all services in seconds.

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Installing Services

To install a service, go to the settings and select the services tab. In this tab, you can add new services and manage existing ones. When you add a service, Herd suggests a name and a free port, so you can run multiple versions of the same service side by side.
Services tab of the settings without any services
Select a service to see its configuration. You can change its name, port and whether Herd starts it automatically, and Herd saves your changes right away. The details also show the version, the data and binary directories, the environment variables that your application needs to connect to the service, and its latest log output. Every service has a binary directory where the applications files live and a data directory where the service stores the data and custom configuration. You can access both folders by right-clicking the service and selecting the destination.
Screenshot of service settings

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Managing Services

All services have a right click menu with actions for the individual service. These actions always include a force quit option and directory shortcuts but also provide individual actions that are tailored to the service, like copying the connection URL, cloning or updating the service. If you want to use a service for a specific Laravel application, you can select it in the Applications window and Herd updates the .env file for you. Learn more in Per-Site Services.

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Managing Services via the CLI

You can manage all your services from the command line as well. This is especially useful for automation, scripting, and AI coding agents. All service commands can be run without specifying a target – Herd will present interactive prompts to let you select the service type, version, or instance.
For the full list of CLI commands, see the Command Line reference.

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Available Services

Herd Pro ships with the following services: You can see which versions Herd provides in the version matrix.

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Deleting Services

You can delete services via right-clicking on them in the service manager and selecting delete. You can also delete a service via the CLI: