Alternatives to Laragon

I hesitate between WAMP and EasyPHP, but there are perhaps other tools ?

Laravel Herd is available for Windows?

@tykus @martinbean I wait tomorrow to see what he will choose ;).

I second @tykus on this one, Laravel Herd + DBnigin is all you ever going to need.

You can just install NginX, MariaDB and PHP. Then use them as is. I get the zip versions.

Of course this section of nginx.conf is different for Windows verses Linux:

        location ~ \.php$ {
            include "fastcgi.conf";
            
            root           www;
            #try_files $uri $uri/ /404.php?$args;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            #fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

All three can be setup in about 15 or so minutes. Once setup upgrading them to a new version is easy.

I avoid tools like Laragon @vincent15000 . For quick testing, I just use composer run dev For more realistic, production-like environments, I configure Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, and hosts manually within my wsl

In my experience, developing directly on Windows leads to constant friction, unexpected permission issues, unreliable filesystem performance, and poor tooling support for many open-source stacks. If your friend is serious about PHP or Laravel development, WSL2 with Ubuntu is a far better route.

For windows, WSL with Docker for definite (I use Debian as my WSL Linux distro). Been using this setup since WSL was available for Windows and thus far, been pretty hassle free. I use PHPStorm in the Windows side of things and hook that up to the Docker containers in WSL with all the goodies available (Xdebug, PHPStan, etc etc).