Laragon is the best option for windows users out there than homestead.

Absolutely agree. I was an early adopter of Laragon and cant say enough positive things about it!

Every windows user needs to try it out and see the extreme ease with which one can get going with a Laravel project (or symfony, cake, lumen, wordpress etc.)

The most recent version brings in all the features present in Laravel Valet and more. Here are a few reasons why I moved to Laragon on my dev workstation(s):

1. Installation works consistently across Windows 7, 8 and 10 (Vagrant and virtualbox on the other hand are extremely finicky). ALL third party tools are conveniently bundled in one directory (c:/laragon/bin by default)
2. Takes about 600 MB for the "full" version.. but this is around 1/4th of the space required by Homestead+vagrant+virtualbox
3. Running Node js on homestead + vagrant on windows is a real nightmare. Because Laragon runs node.js natively, it just works!
4. Highly customizable : You can install multiple versions of Nginx, Mysql and PHP and use them as required in different projects
5. Faster since it is all native binaries. Vagrant+homestead has a lot more overhead.

@gator well said.

Absolutely brilliant! Now dropped xampp completely, Laragon is so easy. And I love the way the URL .dev extension is set automatically. With Windows 10, Surface Pro 4 and Laragon, bye bye Mac!

I'm a recent convert to Laragon. After years of struggles with Homestead / Vagrant / VirtualBox, especially when it comes to an upgrade of any of them, Laragon makes Windows development so simply. I highly recommend trying it if you're a Windows developer.

I wholeheartedly agree with those of you promoting Laragon for Windows over Homestead. This discussion captures the flavour of the problems of using Homestead on Windows:

https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/homestead-20-on-windows-impossible

The Laravel documentation makes extraordinary claims that Homestead will make developing with Laravel "delightful", "simple" and "elegant", and "No more worrying about messing up your operating system!", but in the end after really hours of Googling, and messing around and re-installing Vagrant etc, I found that Homestead on Windows made Laravel development an absolute nightmare. The documentation for Homestead is probably sufficient for Linux and Mac environments, but getting things running on Windows needs someone who has solved all the tough obstacles that WIndows puts in the way. Then because of this thread, I discovered Laragon.

I installed Laragon in minutes and had a test version of my complex Laravel app up and running (with an SSL certificate no less!) within an hour or two. I completely understand that this doesn't match exactly the production environment I have set up on DigitalOcean, but it's the Laravel app I need to test locally, not the exact details of how Apache or PHP is configured.

Laragon is exactly what I need for the first stage of development on my local machine.