Introduction

Valet WSL is an advanced development environment for Windows Subsystem for Linux. No Vagrant, no hosts file manual management. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels. Yeah, we like it too.

Valet WSL configures your system to always run Nginx in the background when your machine starts. Because of the WSL limitations, DnsMasq is not used, instead valet manages the hosts files when any website is linked or unlinked.

In other words, a blazing fast PHP development environment that uses roughly 7mb of RAM. Valet WSL isn't a complete replacement for Valet Linux+, Laravel Valet, Vagrant or Homestead, but provides a great alternative if you want flexible basics, prefer extreme speed, or are working on a machine with a limited amount of RAM.

This is a port of Valet Linux+ made for WSL. If you want the DnsMasq version of this project, please check it out.

Official Documentation

Installing Valet WSL

Important

• Always run Valet commands from a WSL shell runned as administrator.

Requirements

Required OS	WSL Ubuntu 14.04+
OS Packages	sudo apt-get install jq xsel
PHP Version	7.4, 8.0, 8.1
PHP Extensions	php-cli php-curl php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml php-zip

Installation

• Install or update PHP to one of the versions mentioned in the requirements.
• Install Composer from the official website.
• Install Valet WSL with Composer via composer global require eptic/valet-wsl.
• Add export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin" to your .bashrc file.
• Run the valet install command. This will configure and install Valet WSL with all the required services, it will also register the Valet's daemon to launch when your system starts.
• Once Valet WSL is installed, you can run valet start to start all the services, and you can check if valet is working by visiting the page http://localhost.

Switching PHP Version

Switch PHP version using the command:

valet use <version>

Example:

valet use 8.1

Use --update-cli flag to update PHP cli version as well.

Database

Valet WSL automatically installs MySQL. It includes a tweaked my.cnf which is aimed at improving speed.

Change password

It can be single line of code to change your MySQL password. We don't have to always login to MySQL and find for the query and execute it. It's just that simple as below:

valet db:password <old-password> <new-password>

List databases

valet db:list

Creating database

Create a new database using:

valet db:create <database-name>

When no name is given it will use the current working directory as the name of the database

valet db:create

Dropping database

valet db:drop <name>

When no name is given it will use the current working directory as the name of the database

valet db:drop

Domain Alias / Symlinks

Display all of the registered symbolic links:

valet links

Add the current folder as a symlink:

valet link

For example:

$(/src/beel) valet link

This will create a symbolic link for the current folder and point it to beel.test

Securing sites with TLS

By default, Valet serves sites over plain HTTP. However, if you would like to serve a site over encrypted TLS using HTTP/2, use the secure command.
For example, if your site is being served by Valet on the example.test domain, you should run the following command to secure it:

valet secure example

If you don't provide the name and the current working directory is linked to a domain, it will use the current working directory as the domain.

$(/src/beel) valet secure

This will make beel.test to work with https://beel.test

License

Valet WSL is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license