Download Herd

Download Laravel Herd

Purchase Herd Pro

Purchase a license for Herd Pro

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Why Herd?

Herd is a blazing fast, native Laravel and PHP development environment for Windows. It provides everything that you need to get started with Laravel development. It ships with PHP, nginx, and Node.js. You can integrate Herd with Laravel Forge and use a single tool from setting up your site locally to deploying it on a remote server. Herd Pro completes your development environment with service management for databases, caches, and more. It comes with testing and debugging tools tailored to Laravel, and you’ll love them when you’re working on web applications every day. After installing Herd, it routes all requests to *.test domains to sites on your local machine, and allows you to use composer, the Laravel installer, and Expose directly in your terminal. More than 50,000 web developers use Herd every day to create awesome web applications for their users, and they love it.

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Requirements

Herd requires Windows 10 or higher and needs administrator privileges during the setup process.

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Installation

You can download the latest version of Herd here. After downloading the installer, you need to run it with admin permissions so that the installer can add the HerdHelper service that is responsible for updating your hosts file and map directories and linked sites to .test domains. After the installation process is complete, you have a fully-functioning PHP and Laravel development environment. This means you can invoke the herd, php, laravel, and composer binaries from your terminal: 
herd --version
php --version
laravel --version
composer --version
node --version
Herd does not alter any services on your system, and if it’s not for you, you can easily switch back to your previous setup.

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Performance

Sometimes the Windows Defender likes to scan Herd folders and decreases your Herd performance. You can create an exclude rule for the Herd config folder for Windows Defender by adding the path %USERPROFILE%\.config\herd to it and mitigate this issue. 1. Open Windows Security
  • Press the Start button and search for “Windows Security”.
  • Alternatively, open it from the system tray in the bottom-right corner.
2. Go to “Virus & threat protection”
  • In the Windows Security app, click “Virus & threat protection”.
  • Scroll down and click “Manage settings” under the Virus & threat protection settings section.
3. Navigate to Exclusions
  • Scroll down to “Exclusions”.
  • Click “Add or remove exclusions”.
4. Add a New Folder Exclusion
  • Click ”+ Add an exclusion” → choose “Folder”.
  • Enter or browse to the folder:
%USERPROFILE%.config\herd
This typically resolves to something like: C:\Users\YourUsername\.config\herd
5. Confirm the Selection
  • Click “Select Folder” or confirm the prompt to save the exclusion.
After updating the exclusion, you should notice an improvement in Herd’s performance as Windows Defender will no longer scan the specified folder.