PHP Monitor was originally intended to be a tool created for use with Laravel Valet, but over time it has definitely changed a lot. Many features were added, and it has even expanded to also support a standalone mode without Valet.
One thing has been consistent all this time, however: PHP Monitor has always required a little bit of manual setup before you can start using it. You need both Homebrew and PHP to be installed, and your PATH to be configured correctly, after all. That takes a little bit of work.
All in all, it’s not super difficult, but it’s definitely a bit of a hurdle for new users today, and it’s something I’ve remedied with the latest update to what used to be a simple toolbar app. At this point, it’s more than just that.
Valet as the default
Back in 2020, most people were using Valet as it was the go-to way to get started with Laravel. The setup was solid: you installed various dependencies as part of Homebrew, you installed Valet (a CLI app) via Composer, and PHP Monitor provided you with a pretty easy to use user interface.
The most common use case was simply installing PHP Monitor alongside the development environment that you already had set up. But it was not hassle-free. The nature of Homebrew’s linked libraries as such was that many folks did not like how long it took to install updates for dependencies; and not keeping dependencies up-to-date meant there was an increased chance of a binary no longer working correctly. If it was PHP, well, your Valet setup would be broken.
It’s why PHP Monitor came along and gained in popularity – it’d monitor your Valet setup, and gave you easy access to your sites and projects via a simple GUI. If anything went wrong and your install was broken, the app identifies the issue and tells you what commands to run in your terminal to get things working again.
The landscape changes
A few years later, Laravel Herd came along with php.new, which is heavily pushed by the Laravel organization and Beyond Code as the first-party and best way to set up your development environment. This ships a static version of PHP and is a bit more portable.1
It’s nice, but I personally think it’s more convenient to manage all your dependencies with Homebrew. It feels cleaner somehow. I am, of course, a little bit biased here.2
So ever since these came into being I wondered if it was possible to improve the onboarding experience for PHP Monitor, so it can remain a viable alternative. It’s true that Herd is first-party way to do things, but PHP as a whole is broader than Laravel, and not everyone is using Laravel Herd. There’s plenty of other options.
It’s actually for this reason that I originally called my app PHP Monitor, because I know there’s a whole world of developers out there which are building projects with other PHP-based frameworks or CMS systems which are unaffiliated with the Laravel organization.
Plus, even if you use Laravel, Valet still remains supported and I know plenty of developers still use it. It’s for those developers that I still maintain and update PHP Monitor (and also for myself).3
Onboarding for new users
Anyway, that’s a little bit of history.
I hope it helps you understand why it took me so long to get here. It’s because of these historical reasons, the app has been light on the onboarding experience for new users, because it was intended for users who already used Valet.
In today’s release, that changes. In this new update, PHP Monitor has received a new onboarding experience. As such, I’ve internally dubbed this month’s release the Big Onboarding Update, and I’ve been calling it that for a while now.
I’m glad it’s finally here!
The onboarding flow is especially important because I suspect there are many new users who try PHP development. These folks are probably going to be finding their way to Herd or PHP Monitor if they’re looking for a GUI and something lightweight.
I hope that this “new user experience” may help PHP Monitor find a new or broader audience.
After all, convenience does matter. That’s been made abundantly clear to me over the past few years. It’s part of the appeal of PHP Monitor, and of some of the other projects I’ve worked on in the past few years. People will use stuff that makes their life easier and less complicated.
I hope that PHP Monitor can continue to keep doing so for the foreseeable future.
The new onboarding functionality I described above, and some other minor additions are now available with the arrival of version 26.05.
Updated website
I also pushed an update to the website of the app. You may notice that what used to be PHP Monitor’s unofficial tagline… is now the official tagline. I hope this explains why the icon of the app has been a truck all these years!
The website has also been updated to mention the Setup Assistant, and it’s also been restructured somewhat to reflect the current nature of the app. A small FAQ is now also present on the one-pager.
Without a doubt, there are some advantages to a static version of PHP. It’s easier to update since there are no linked dependencies, and it can be faster because those linked dependencies do not need to be loaded. If there’s enough cache (as there is on the Mac with Apple silicon) it can be a tad faster. I’ve thought about shipping PHP Monitor with static binaries but I decided against it since that’d just make it worse. (Unless I ship it as an additive feature; i.e. you can can use Homebrew OR an embedded version of PHP. That’d work, but it’s too much work for too little gain at this time.) ↩
A static version of PHP is an isolated version of PHP that is managed externally from all the other potential dependencies that you should probably be installing via Homebrew anyway. For example, the go-to method to install the latest version of Python, Rust or Go on a Mac doesn’t involve downloading static binaries from a third party. If you go to php.net and visit the download page you will see that they recommend using Homebrew on the Mac. ↩
I don’t think Laravel will deprecate Valet, but if they ever do that, I will start working on a drop-in replacement for Valet (albeit without integration for the “share” functionality that is currently built-in) so that PHP Monitor can continue to work as expected. ↩
This was not generated: Unless explicitly specified, the posts on my blog are my own creative work. 100% written (typos included) and edited by me; not generated using e.g. large language models.
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